Granniana

Thinking of Joy, of Jeff,

Of Jihyun, of Corin,

Of the Fanians

By Gudrun Sabrina Hirt

Introduction

Granniana is the name of my grandmother. She was called Granny Anna from the time she was only four, and it became one name, very unusual, just as the very unusual person she turned out to be especially when she grew up to be an old lady.

I am her grandson. My name is Barney Orchard. That is the name I had to write at the top of every sheet of paper at school. But since Barney the Friendly Dinosaur came out I have a stamp collection of different signatures I use at times if I can get away with it.

Writing this memoir of my grandmother, Granniana, I am near the end of my own personal life expectancy – which is forty-five. The greatest work I’ve ever written was something I did when I was eight years old, at school. In case the yellowed paper it was written on should disintegrate with the coming and going of the ages, I’ve scanned this greatest of my works several times onto my laptop and saved it on a few Cds I preserve in my freezer. And I’ve saved it on other people’s email accounts. The original manuscripts remain hidden inside a trunk in the attic. At the top of the first page in a child’s tall scraggly letters: “The Best Person in the World.”

If I were to go back to Elementary School and sit again in Creative Writing Class with the teacher telling us to write about who is the best person in the world I still would write about the same person. The best person in the world in my opinion is my grandmother, as it was when I was eight. This is my final conclusion to the teacher’s question that carried on pending throughout the years of my life. I’ll tell you the main points for why my grandma is so unique. You might find it hard to believe that my grandma has her very own thumb print entirely unique to anybody else’s. And that’s just her being different as far as thumb prints go.

My Grandmother is not only remembered by myself. There are plenty of people who still hold her in admiration for deciding near the end of her life in her eighties to do things differently from what was expected of her age group. Being different from her peers, my grandmother started a movement of waving down at cars from tree-tops along the country road – in particularly the one road which was used for commuters in a hurry with work and business on their minds. Many elderly joined the movement across Canada – mainly women though because they wore skirts and the urinating down for drivers to see was the second half of the statement my grandma intended to make: women have the right to let go of whatever they are having to hold in. They can let go of their continence that society’s demands and restrictions and norms create. Even the simplest things such as peeing when and where one wants to and on whom. If they weren’t allowed to let go their feelings as a two-year-old or all through their childhood, then they must as elderly women.

Peeing can also be self-defence. It is not accepted as anything permissible for a woman to do facing the wall in public places and is looked down on in old age. Everybody ran away from Granniana’s pee. When journalists came to talk to her, she waited until they got to stand right under the tree just so she could cackle about the journalists’ papers getting wet and yellow! That was my grandma, Granniana.

Introduction, Part 2

Granniana was hardly ever teased for her name at school because she became a celebrity before she even started school. She was the only child who could swing branch to branch and tree to tree. It looked surreal to everybody, that’s why Granniana became so famous. With all her fame, she got away with writing down Granny for short.

When Granniana finished her elementary education at the one room school house by the creek overgrown with wild flowers, it was Granniana Crawler on her school-leaving certificate. She walked with it across the bridge with pride in every step and then she let the paper slip off her fingers and soak nicely in the rumbling water below. It floated away. That was the first and only certificate she ever got until later when she was eighty-six and decided to go to university after all. She could do it even without having ever gone to High School. She could have gone to High School when she was fourteen, but she used her scholarship she won to buy her mother a real copper stove and her sister, a new mother, a pram because Granniana knew many women were jealous of how life seemed so easy for her, being famous and excelling in school and all. But at the time anybody who asked her why she didn’t use her scholarship to go to High School, the reason was because she didn’t want to come back wearing spectacles. Anybody Granniana had heard or seen of who went to get further education came back wearing glasses or spectacles as they had been called in their day. So Granniana wasn’t going. Of course, little did she know she was going to wear glasses sixty years down the line, but little do people know these things – they shouldn’t be blamed. Granniana, before she had to start wearing glasses at sixty, used to say, “I ain’t wearin’ no glasses on my pretty face as sure as I ain’t wearin’ them on my bloomers.”

Granniana loved her farm. Her parents had worked very hard on it and Granniana was their heir. Until she was eighty-six going to university she didn’t part from her home farm.

Granniana’s father was a farmer well-known for chewing on weeds day in day out as he worked the fields – raw, sweet and juicy, he said they were – and there were 87 acres of those fields. He never smoked. As you can tell, this was the day before anybody used chemical herbicides or Round-up or anything to kill weeds. That’s why there were so many to pick out of the ground. My Great-grandpa didn’t go down in history but he was the anonymous inventor of the farming contraption used in Canada for sowing seeds across the fields. Instead of being pulled by horses or a donkey, which had been the primitive convention of the day, my Great-Grandpa Antioch Crawler invented a sowing machine pulled by ducks he caught by the pond. He called it a Singer, after his wife’s sewing machine at home. He only had gone to school three years as a child and so it was a phenomenon to him how such very different action words could have the same word: sewing clothes and sowing fields – and only be spelled differently by a single letter.

Great-grandpa Antioch was the one who gave Granniana her name. Her real name had been Annie. So Great-grandpa Antioch sang,

“Yes Granny Annie,

Yes, my old Granny,

My Granny she kno-ows the best.

She needn’t a nanny

She won’t change her ways –

“Know the truth: I’m the best” – that is her request.

My dear little Granny, my granny you’ll stay.

And when I’m old and tired and grey

Who is it my pension will pay? –

“You didn’t work enough” the government will say.

So good friends with my granny must start today

It is Granniannie my pension shall pay!

He said to himself, “The brave old Indians who gave us this land could name their children any time they liked, not just within a few days after their birth. Names weren’t for the sake of having a name. Names were to tell the tribe something about you.” Grandpa Antioch only had two children. Granniana and the other called Fred even though she was a girl.

At home, later, at lunchtime, Grandpa Antioch could barely swallow his soup for the joy of his invention of a name for his daughter. “She’s Granniana. She was born a granny.” And the mother agreed, though she reminded him how he had only ever seen Granniana and never any other newborn baby. Grandpa wouldn’t believe that every baby looked just the same as Granniana had at the time, with every bit of the amount of wrinkles. Grandma Alda didn’t want to voice her worries about how other people might laugh about her daughter’s name in the future. She did not think the name appropriate even for the present, for a four-year old.

Granniana was a little girl with hair in two braids, jet black and freckles across her wide-smiling face. She swung through the branches of a tree. She had an older sister – just one who I never met thank goodness – I’ve only heard bad things about her. Frederica was her name but Granniana called her Fred. Fred had been hogging the swing, as usual, sitting there all day long eating peaches and reading and even sleeping. She wouldn’t get off. A swing in those days, we all know, was the equivalent of the entire sofa in front of the family television. Granniana decided she wouldn’t need a swing any longer. Her young cheerful freckles threatening a storm, she went to show how much easier and how much higher she could swing with her bare arms. “Fred, look at me!” Pretty soon she could make it swinging from branch to branch. She could make it across from one tree to another by the end of the afternoon. You wouldn’t be able to believe your eyes. It was paranormal. The child had paranormal talent. Her father did not know that our ancestors, the monkeys, had done this long before. He was really proud also that the little Granniana was finding her own inventive streak which actually really came from her father. It made him beam proudly – my Great Grandfather was remembered for his characteristic beaming proudly. His own invention had been mallard ducks doing something spectacular, but now his daughter did something far better.

Everyone from the neighbouring farms came to watch her and they all applauded when the little monkey made it to the other side, especially when for a moment it looked she wasn’t going to make it. It grew to be the best thing any child could ever do – outside of school anyway. Better than learning not to stare when there was someone hobbling by with a big hunchback. Other children – though mainly only girls, tried to do the same thing as Granniana on their farms but they never made it to be as great as the little Granniana Crawler, not even by the time they were elderly women. Only Granniana can do that.

Many people have said that the phenomenon happened to Granniana because of a magic cow. Granniana’s family had a cow and it gave milk – of course that was usual. However, it wasn’t ordinary milk. It had added Vitamin A and D and hormones. Of course, this was only a rumour back in the day when milk in the big cities was beginning to be pasteurised and fortified with extra vitamins. And so people in the country – perhaps out of jealous spite – just branded Granniana’s family’s cow as one of those cows from the cities. “Fortified milk. Milk with additives.” At least they could say the words. Common folk in the country never went to university. And that was why they actually believed fortified cow’s milk made you do anything you wanted to, even if it was something unrealistic like swinging from tree to tree in your common orchard.

These farmers with minds so plain were so reluctant to give Granniana her due credit for her talent and others wanted to give the credit to her father for his particularly strong arms and therefore Granniana had the strength to swing from tree to tree. It was swinging with the axe her father did. He even used to win gold ribbons at farmers’ festival competitions for who could chop five tons of firewood the fastest. In the culture of the time this was something that was not only an entertainment and sport at social events and gatherings, it was a highly beneficial skill to have. (This was the time when pioneers cleared the forests for their homesteads of course without knowing about erosion and the necessity of oxygen or they would never have done it.)

People used to say that sometimes when they’d meet him after working hours sitting on a tree stump they could catch sight of veins in his arms twitching. Great-Grandpa Antioch would nurse them and say: “Well – that’s just how chopping wood itches in my bulging arm veins.”

Granniana become famous and grew the same kind of muscles though you couldn’t see them as you never can with people who are strong because they’re stubborn. Strength really is all in the mind. Lots of people came to watch Granniana swing through the trees, so many people that Great-Grandpa Antioch could have become rich enough to build a palace and palace gardens like in Versailles. But he did not ask any money and any donations were burnt. Circus masters came too. Once when Granniana was ten she was kidnapped by some clowns – that was the only time she ever really used her arm muscles. She bent the iron bars of the lion’s cage they had put her in and jumped out just when the caravan turned a corner getting too far from home. Granniana was a child heroine.

Granniana was still like a child when she was an actual granny with proper grey hair and the rest. “My parents had had the right intentions for me though. My Dad wanted to name me Granniana because he wanted me to be a really strong Granny one day, one with a sense of humour that makes people happy. Sense of humour is sometimes the only way people are happy – at least for a while. My Dad admired medicine women in Native American literature. He wanted his daughters to be just like Medicine Women. My sister Fred became a pharmacist. And I helped people take their very own medicine which I think is the best medicine in the world: laughter. And I didn’t have to go to some dull and controlling college where you’re not allowed to laugh throughout exams and where you have to behave yourself so seriously. Thank Providence.”

If Granniana would be asked to laugh for you she probably would not have known which kind of laugh to laugh for you. I mean, my grandmother was just like anybody else with a variety of kinds of laughs. When she was younger, still in her eighties, Granniana had a crazy laugh, a mad laugh, a lunatic laugh, a joking laugh, a friendly laugh, a sympathetic laugh, a tired laugh, a sarcastic laugh, a defiant laugh, a frightened laugh, a frightening laugh, a dark laugh, an innocent toddler’s laugh even and lots more. There was one type of laugh which was quite distinct from all the others though. That was her mean laugh – which every normal human being lets out once in a while and it’s healthy for them. This mean laugh I connect in particular with when she’d be serving our favourite desert that everybody had been looking forward to so much and Granniana had spoiled it on purpose in advance by mixing insecticide in it. We tasted it out right away – maybe some of us only after two or three spoons so as not to let her down. We were completely supportive of her cooking and baking even though she was so old and had a hard time lifting trays and pots in the kitchen. But we couldn’t tell her to stop working in the kitchen – even though it was only occasional that she poisoned the desert once in a while. And trust me – ready-made chocolate mouse for example tastes just like mud compared to Granniana’s home-made chocolate pudding from the finest scratch from scratch.

Maybe it is alright to be mean once in a while, putting poison in her family’s food, so long as no one is poisoned to death. None of us ever were and we never shall be. We have kept up the putting of poison in deserts as family tradition to remind ourselves that Granniana lived past one hundred years old because of her immune resistance to poison. Granniana was a fighter for her conviction that there is poison not only in bottles with a picture of a skull on it. There’s poison sprayed on fruits and vegetables, poison from the emission of cars, poison in tap water, poison in the atmosphere and stratosphere.

Introduction Part 3

Granniana had a laugh that was like dark bitter chocolate. The dark bitter over 80% cocoa. This was what life was like to her. Bitter, extra-bitter. And she loved it. There were times she ate up a whole extra bitter chocolate from beginning to end within half an hour and she got heart-palpitations from it . . .

Then there was also the laugh that was about forgetting the bitterness of life. Maybe it was the white chocolate laugh, no rice crisps, no hazelnut bits or almonds, just pure white chocolate . . . On a sunny spring day with trees blossoming white looking just like clouds when they sparkle and glisten because it’s about to rain, you’d find her high up in her element. All was right with the world. Pay attention to what your ears were telling you because when you would begin hearing the gentle pitter patter of rainfall but the sun was shining really bright and the sky was blue, then you were listening to the sound of something else . . . There! An ever radiant, chimpish-impish smiling face turning to you with the background of innocent apple blossoms, the glint in Granniana’s glasses showed she was definitely up to mischief. Sometimes her 1940’s daintily dotted skirt was lifted up so could see a pair of white bloomers all frilled and ruffled dripping yellow pee!

The funny thing is Granniana never used the toilet. Inside the house she only had chamber pots. She believed toilets wasted fresh water and had to be cleaned again and again.

Granniana sure drank a lot of water. She brought pitchers full of fresh water wherever she went. When driving out anywhere, the car was full of them. They were usually more than she could drink.

As to drinking of the other kind, my Grandma never drank a bottle of wine a day like old people do who live to be a hundred. My Grandma had been vice-president of a Women’s Temperance Society. Her name is still engraved at their head quarters on a slab of gold. The Women’s Temperance Society guaranteed that so long as Granniana didn’t die of any illnesses related to alcoholism, she would be honoured at her funeral. Granniana was in deed rewarded with a bouquet of flowers at her funeral and two wreaths with red ribbons hanging from them. She had been a loyal member until death, never losing her temperance though losing her temper quite a lot was only human. Most women in the Temperance Society died rather young because of the lack of use of alcohol to cure simple ailments and because their blood was never thinned. But Granniana lived past 100.

Granniana believed in other kinds of natural remedies to cure anything from pollen allergy to premature wrinkles to smelly feet but she didn’t believe in red wine as good for circulation or in whisky for a cold. She refused even to cook or bake with brandy or rum. She used the rubbing alcohol though anywhere alcohol was a necessary ingredient for home baking. The one at 77%, for the whole family. She said it was the only alcohol you could trust since it came from the pharmacy. “Whatever you say, granny,” her father said to her in his old age when he had to eat his daughter’s roast beef and gravies with that pharmacy stuff marinated in it. You wouldn’t know what made him choke eating it, the alcohol or his inability to stop laughing.

Granniana liked to drink organic milk before swinging through the orchard. It had to be organic milk, in glass bottles at the organic store, not from her own cows at the farm. It was organic milk she drank and Granniana’s cows were definitely not organic. If you wanted to visit Granniana, you could spend an afternoon with her in the orchard, sitting in old white Victorian garden chairs, a fancy white Victorian garden table, drinking glasses of organic milk and eating cookies from McDonald’s.

“Have some McDonald’s cookies,” she would say to you. “Eat McDonald’s cookies – nothing else from McDonald’s, the rest is evil. I love the cookies. The most carcinogous substance you can eat. There’s reused cooking oils in them just as much as in the burgers.” She would grin her toothless grin. “Animal fat cooked at ultra high temps.” Next, she’d bite into one of them with a grimace of discomfort because of her toothless gums (Granniana refused to wear dentures). The next bite of the cookie would be for you. If you accepted then she’d watch you chew until you swallowed. (By the way, carcinogous means cancer-causing.)

“Now quick – the organic milk. Organic milk sogs up the cancerous cells in the cookie so they can do you no harm, thank Providence! Listen to the health magazines!” Granniana was a pioneer worrying about people’s cancer risks. If she fed you something to minimize them in your genes or in your high-risk way of living or anything, the best you could do was let her take over and say thank you to her for it. Granniana humbly would thank you for thanking you and hobble away to the nearest tree and climb up it. Once again she’d be swinging high and swinging low – Granniana my . . . Granni-an oh no.

As I was kid, she told me if all the kids in my class died of cancer and heart disease eating McDonalds when they were older it would be a good thing. “Then, you my grandson will be the only one of my generation still alive – pardon me, did I say my generation? I meant your generation,” Granniana chuckled most of the time in between sentences, not taking herself too seriously. “That’s when your dreams of changing the world will come true with one wink of your eye. You’ll stand on the very top of the world, giving orders until there won’t be any people left to take any orders . . .”

My grandma nurtured some wise thoughts on politics. “I can see that’s what them politicians want with us. It’s always been that way. They want the world for themselves so they do all they can to let people die out or at least rob them of their power. Any power to think and do as we like. They even try to arrest people for swinging on trees – thank Providence I’m exempt from that. What are the ways to rob you of your power, Barney, do you know, my boy? Why, it’s with wars, with plagues, with poverty, with famines, with worries, with fears, with alcohol, with all kinds of distractions and worries or with junk food so you won’t have the will power to leave your comfortable sofa seat no more. So you want to be a politician my boy? If you become one that’ll be the day I send all the animals on my farm to stampede down the parliament building – just so you can learn once and for all to keep out of politics. Might as well take the filth of barnyard animals over your head than the filth of them politics.”

As a boy, I think all I could do was gulp and nod and promise.

Of course I took my grandma seriously and not only never wanted to be Prime Minister of Canada – not ever – but I secretly feared that my grandma’s farm animals would actually come to flatten the parliament building in Ottawa someday. Or maybe even the White House in the USA. That’s a secret I had to hide. I needed to pretend I was just like all the other boys in class at school. One teacher though once made a comment drawing attention to my whitened face when another boy in class was drawing a picture of the Ottawa parliament building on the blackboard. I used to pretend I didn’t know what the capital of Canada was so I could avoid my embarrassing stammering “O-o-o-ot . . . t-ta . . . O-o-t . . . t-taw . . . Taw.” That’s as far as I could get saying the name Ottawa.

When the mother of my friend at school commented how I was such a humble and shy boy and couldn’t ever become the Prime Minister of Canada or army general or anything like that, Granniana returned, “Well, would you ever think that Barney is this very way because it is I his grandmother who keeps telling him is going to become Prime Minister someday, Barney?”

I remember my friend and his mom left to go home because they lacked sense of humour. Granniana and I remained in the garden. Granniana busily tended to some of the black currents bushes which needed picking. Granniana began to preach. “Re-introduce home-made cooking from scratch, if I’ll be Prime Minister that’s the first things I’d do. The whole world will take Canada as a role model. We’ll just say we’re part of the United States. A good role model for the world, that’s what we’ll be. That’s what you have the power to do when you’re Prime Minister, Barney. Or even just Vice-president. Fast-food? No other than fast-food comprised of organic fresh-pressed apple juice, un-homogenized but pasteurized organic milk, all in glass bottles – recycled glass bottles. There’ll be nothing but fresh-pressed apple juice from organic farms that the Coca Cola Company could make and distribute all around the world. And no tin cans. Recycled glass bottles strictly.”

Introduction Part 4

Eating healthy foods and getting plenty enough exercise didn’t guarantee Granniana an easy life. She suffered consequences for her actions just like everyone else. Granniana was once arrested by the local police for swinging on trees. There was no more arresting after this because a bylaw was passed in the country declaring that anybody young and old swinging on trees beside a road will be arrested. There were quite a lot of young people and old people trying to hang from branches that time. The current law still says that you can only swing from trees if you are over age eighty. That’s eighty you have to be, not eighteen. Many of the elderly people swinging in the trees just a year or two short from eighty – those that had started copying Granniana when they were little – were all arrested – with the usual option to either serve three nights in prison or pay two dollars – which nobody in the country at this time thought was worthwhile. Prisons were safe in Canada because of the low crime rate so there was a party going on in there for a few months while underage tree swingers had to serve their sentences. As for Granniana, it had been her eightieth birthday just a few days before the bylaw was passed. Nobody was going to arrest her for the rest of her life.

She was still arrested by accident though, once, by two police officers who hadn’t learned the new by-laws. Once they arrived at prison, they were advised to let her go or there’d be big trouble. “You’re just lucky, Granniana. This was good timing, your birthday,” the cops told her. The hand-cuffs just made of soft felt – done so in our country when it’s for vulnerable people such as the elderly. “I guess we’ve made a mistake. We didn’t do our homework reading the new laws. You’ll be off the hook the rest of your life for swinging on trees.”

Granniana nodded assertively. “Yes, thanks be to Providence. Providence, and not luck, gentlemen. Luck comes from Lucifer.” This was still at the time Granniana went to church. Later she didn’t talk that way anymore, she got too old to go to church. She prayed in her garden or her orchard or sometimes I’ve been told, sitting on her chamber pot – and falling asleep, though.

My grandma grew up in the golden olden days when people said it’s ‘Providence’ every time such things happened. But she said ‘it’s Providence’ only when she was still really really excited, jumping up and down, clapping her hands – you can imagine. She had grown up in an Evangelical Community but this community all stopped their happy clappy tradition just because Granniana started to give them such a bad reputation with her clapping. Anyway, “It’s Providence” actually didn’t come from them anyway, it came from the Methodist Church.

My grandmother didn’t go to church anymore in the nineties because of the praise and worship songs being far too immoral for a lady from her generation. The expressions of love to God such as “You’re my one desire” was something Granniana could not sing without thinking of a second meaning, looking around at everybody else with outstretched arms. Were they thinking the same thing? “Hold me close, draw me to your side” – with this she turned to her neighbours standing on either side and hugged her own waist in protection and to show that she was not expecting this kind of love from anyone secretly. “I’ve never felt a love like this before” went another song – she looked horrified, and looked around her, eyes goggling, but nobody really noticed because they were immersed and deep into whatever they were feeling. “And I . . . I’m desperate for you” was another one of those lines Granniana couldn’t sing from her heart without becoming very tense and a little terrified. She knew she must be very very bad for getting these kinds of thoughts that she couldn’t block out of her head. That was the reason why she stayed with the church for a couple of years. She owed it to
God to become a better person and to learn to love Him the same way she loved her late husband who died when she was sixty. When she finally began to accept that it wasn’t such a bad thing that she couldn’t do that, she began to disagree about the songs in the middle of the services which eventually followed in her being excommunicated from one church congregation to another.

She still believed in Providence though. This was her name for God. There wasn’t a day she didn’t forget to “Thank Providence”. Most people didn’t know what Providence meant because it was outdated language. Everything about Granniana was outdated. Her head and her emotions, her tongue co-ordination still were set in outdated habits. Well, when anybody should turn eighty years old themselves, I’d like to see how fast they can learn the slang and jargon of the future – if there’ll be anyone at the Old Age Nursing Home to teach and drill them.

That’s the reason Granniana stayed at home, she didn’t want to have to change. She only left home once when she was eighty-six to go to university for two years. She was convinced if she would go to live in an Old Age Nursing Home, she’d have to start talking like all the people she knew and visited in there who lost their usual ways of speaking because they were being trained to modernize. “As for me, Thank Providence, I’m an old dog you can’t teach new tricks to. That’s what. I failed all my university essays but I passed all the exams with pretty good marks. That’s because for exams you only need short-term memory – and my short-term memory’s pretty good. For writing essays you need to have knowledge and I just can’t learn anything to keep inside my head for longer than about twenty-four hours. I’ve learned everything I needed for me exams and then sat and wrote them in twenty-four hours’ time.”

For any information and history from the Granniana’s Good Old Days, Granniana’s brain was a fossil. I’m not kidding about what I’m about to tell you – I know it doesn’t sound like this is something technology can offer but it was done in Frankenstein’s time: When my grandmother was sixty-one, she pledged her brain ahead of time to medical research to keep preserved in a glass forever. Now, after her death, that’s just what has happened to her brain. It sits in its glass jar in a biology laboratory at the University of Montreal. Besides all the knowledge and style of her time that might one day be transferred to somebody else, how about Granniana herself going to be transferred to somebody else by brain-transplant?

I remember Granniana spent a lot of unnecessary time worrying about what would happen to her brain after she died. She didn’t want anything that was in there to go to waste.

Besides my grandmother being on the high-strung side and being a sparkly old lady, I also remember Granniana’s quiet, peaceful moments where she worried not about a thing. In this state of freedom of mind began she would quickly go to her rocking chair on the veranda at sunset. When her arthritis was bad and she couldn’t rock on the rocking chair, all she’d do was sit still and watch the flies around her, listen to the lawnmower, her hands folded neatly over one knee despite any old arthritis. And she’d be elated into the closest to nirvana you can ever get to on earth – and that without any drug assistance or anything like that.

Only mindless children and adults with learning difficulties and the senile are blessed to be in this state.

Granniana said, “Only we can be truly happy for more than two minutes even without any attempts at meditation or tripping or whatever those meditation masters do.” .

Granniana though was a remarkable person to me because she had already been senile from childhood and didn’t need to wait a whole adulthood to gain back senility. Perhaps that has been my most convincing reason why it would take essays and essays about my grandmother being the best person in the world.

Chapter 1: A Fiancée Called “It’s Bogus”

My grandma is just the most lovable person in the world. When I was little I used to say she’s the only person I would marry.

I am Granniana’s only grandson. My Grandma only had one surviving child, my father. And my parents have only daughters – seven of them. I’m their only son. My family is very important to me. It’s not so much that we are old-fashioned but we all know it’s a lot easier living at home and working at home. I work from home as an online distance learning Medical course tutor. People can become proper physicians nowadays without having to attend classes at university. It goes by the National Ethics Law passed two years ago by which dissection and laboratory testing no longer is necessary in order to be a doctor if you are against animal and human dissections, dead or alive.

Everybody in my family lives at home with my parents on the farm. My grandmother is the most respected member of the family. She isn’t useless and shoved to the side because she’s old and useless. Everything Granniana says is listened to and observed and remembered.

As I got older and learned the ways of the world, I had to realize there was a big possibility that my reverence for my grandma might not be appreciated by someone I might want to marry. The fiancée I had at the time said “it’s bogus” to everything my Grandmother said. She even refused to call my grandma by name. I would have to repeat to her every vowel and syllable like a kindergarten teacher: “My Grandma Granniana” – I sometimes failed at making the effort to smile tenderly. “My Grandma, her name is Granniana. Everybody calls her Granniana. Call her Granniana.”

My fiancée was a beautiful lady – like they all are when they can afford to be. I don’t know why, but at that time I was just bored of natural beauty. The more make-up and

the more over-done hair and fur the more points. I think I couldn’t appreciate the bone structure of human faces, in general, at the time.

We met at the cocktail party of an art gallery opening which was her own gallery – though not her own art.

She looked pretty much exactly like an older version of Mrs. Robinson in my favourite film – you know that film called “The Graduate”? I forgot the name of the actress. My fiancee was accomplished and intelligent though, not a frustrated wife and failed artist. She had two degrees, one in Business and Administration, the other in Business and Economics, one master in Business and Accounting and two PhDs in Male Anatomy! You know how in the States they’re coming out with all these new degree courses. She studied in Baltimore and in Arkansas but started off at Yale. I myself kept tanking my years up ceaselessly with university for eleven years. We both firmly believed that everybody needs to tank up the first half of their life with education at proper institutions because you can’t make proper decisions of what to do in life anyway when you’re young. Well, unfortunately somehow I made one decision while I was still on education though I should have known better to leave the decision off till after I graduated: I decided to marry someone and wasn’t off education yet.

After our first meeting at the art gallery opening, I found out that Rita – that was her name – Rita Popits (pronounced ‘poe’ like Edgar Allan Poe, and of course, ordinary ‘pits’) was actually a really down to earth person even though she was glittering from head to toe and was so loaded with money that she paid everyone a drink wherever she went for a night out – can you imagine? She wasn’t a miser. She had earth baths in her castle every week and shared them with me; she watched TV and shared whatever show she was watching with me; she played video games with me. She didn’t ban my pornography – she said at least I had a hobby when so many men don’t really do anything in their free time. She gave me a special type of earth with water whenever I complained of anxiety stomach-ache – which of course, I frequently was absolutely, passionately tormented with when we were together.

The day I was about to ask her to marry me, I actually vomited on her 17^th Century Persian rug with the antique roses on it, despite the healing earth I had ingested earlier sitting in her mud bathtub. Rita had been upset at first, naturally. But then, when we were scrubbing the rug out together the whole thing simply became something to laugh about. I think that was the first time I ever heard Rita laugh from her soul and I felt I had gotten to know the best of who she was. And this was what made me finally realize that she really was the one I wanted to share my life with (of course, another time much later I had to change my mind!) And since I was already on my knees, scrubbing – and on my rug-burned hands, the right time had come to ask her. All I had to do was extract the diamond ring from my pants pocket (trouser pocket in the UK!), present it, and she immediately said “yes”. She said “YES”!

So much with Rita had been related to earth.

By the way, I have only just recently recognized that the whole deal about the importance of earth comes from my having taken my grandmother’s advice too literally. “Marry a down to earth person,” she had advised me from day one when my voice broke to manhood, suddenly. “Try to get a knot tied before your old grandma dies. So your offspring can get to know me. If I should die tomorrow, my grandson, just remember that we all have to go down to earth one day . . . down to earth . . . six foot under. You can thank Providence for that, ‘cos if it weren’t for going underground, we can’t rise on the third day.”

I can’t believe, at the time I listened to this in awe and with the creeps at the same time. “But the spirit rises of course and doesn’t need to be buried six foot under. Besides the fact, a woman though who has a close affinity to earth actually is very likely not going to live all that long. So if you really go and marry a woman because you can think of the money you can live off from even if you never find yourself a decent job, all you need to be sure of is that she’s already down to earth.” And with “down to earth”, her eye brows went up and down. My grandmother had a dark sense of humour as you can tell. I did feel she was coyly trying to accuse me of being interested in Rita just because of her money. I wasn’t interested in Rita’s money, I swear.

Down to earth meant doing family, humble things. Rita did those. She came to visit my family on the farm to pick apples. Apples grow out of the ground – via a tree. Rita didn’t want to go at first, she thought I was being ridiculous, but then I told her it was free and she wouldn’t have to buy any apples from the store for weeks. That sounded really good to her. Rita was just like rich people who try to save where they can in little things. We drove there in her fourth best coach car, which was a navy blue Roll’s Royce.

My family has fifty acres of apple trees. Trees, trees, apple trees . . . and Granniana was there of course. We couldn’t find her when I had wanted to introduce her to my fiancee. So we just picked basket after basket of apples. Rita picked and I put them in the basket. Four hours later, the sound of Granniana was heard tinkling in the distance. It was at least 100 yards away. But when an old lady tinkles, it’s the sound of gold coins on a tin roof.

“Granniana!” I called out. It was absurdly stupid and useless of me because of course I knew Granniana swung in the trees without her hearing aids on. She left them by the bottle of organic milk on the tray in the garden, inside a glass case, to keep the flies from getting to the ear wax left on them.

“Granniana, I would like you to meet Madame Popits!” I remember yelling across the distance. Madame Popits – my Madame Popits did look extremely sexy up in the tree at the moment, I tell ya. She was standing on a ladder. I recommend going apple picking with your spouse or girlfriend if there isn’t anything exciting going on in your relationship. Up on the ladder, all the sparks from the first day we met started fell down from her and swarmed around me like bees. It was because Rita was wearing a one-piece dress without an elastic at the waist, so in the breeze I could look up her dress – all the way to her collar bone.

My eyes fluttering like in a dream, I returned my gaze to my grandma in the distance. A granniana was sighted in one of the apple trees. She was scaling down the tree very briskly, being one of the most ancient race. She had to be careful with her knees. Then without a hobble or a stubble, in her excitement to see me, she crossed the orchard field. Did you know by the way, Granniana only seemed to walk at true capability when she was in her orchard? She often limped around the house on a cane, though left it by the veranda door when she went out to the orchard. And her crutches were only for going to market and to church and to the things old ladies go to and otherwise remained inside the car. Her wheelchair was for going to the beauty salon.

I couldn’t go to meet her half-way across the orchard. Rita was the type who got jealous even if you’d help an old lady across the street or drop a coin for a guy playing the guitar. There are always pros and cons in every relationship.

“Granniana!” I shouted so she could hear. “Granniana, I thought you were deaf. How did you hear me yell over to you?! That was really far, wasn’t it?”

I gave my dear precious grandmother a kiss on her forehead, which was all sweaty and streaked with dirt in the grooves and she was all out of breath.

Granniana pshawed us with her tanned deformed paw-like hand and grinned her toothless smile. “I didn’t hear ya,” she said in return, frail but canny, being the kind of old woman you would say “weeds are hard to kill” to. “But remember. I can smell.” And she tightened the wrinkles on her nose at me and turned her head with the sun-protecting rags around it so to greet my fiancée who was still up on the ladder and still throwing apples for me to pick up. Of course, the apples all got bruised that way. I had to pick them off the ground. The apples were going to a charity organisation anyway.

“I could smell your money, that’s what I could smell! You can be deaf all ye want and you won’t get disabled benefits from the government if ye can smell! They’ll turn you down! That’s the reason I’m still wrecking my limbs working on my farm instead of going cozy in a senior home!” Granniana cackled into Rita’s face, trying to infect her with good humour but I’m afraid Rita was afraid of catching Granniana’s bad breath as a disease or something, the way she turned away. Bad breath can be contagious or give you blemishes.

I felt my natural protectiveness over my bed partner rise above family ties. Whether it was serious or just an ice-breaker, my fiancee did not deserve to be said such a thing to. Rita got down from the ladder. Her face had turned red and she wasn’t smiling. She didn’t introduce herself and I stayed silent. Rita gave warning signals before her violence broke out, by the way. Her face never got red except when she was doing her yoga head stands and she was asked to stay posed like that for me to do a quick charcoal sketch of her. (By the time we broke up, by the way, I had filled out an entire book of sketches of Rita.)

“It’s bogus,” was what Rita said, hands on her hips. “Barney, tell her it’s bogus what she’s saying. All the money is with our driver in our car where it’s parked by your family’s house, and in the bank. There’s no money for your grandmother to smell. And what bogus, to smell anything from such a distance!”

To beautify her speech a little for her, I added, “Granniana, Madame Popits. Rita honey, this is my Grandma Granniana.”

“What’s her name?” my fiancée returned just the way when she was placed a burnt, over-done steak before her when she had ordered bloody rare. Probably, I had not pronounced it clear enough, my grandmother’s name. After all, it’s not a usual name.

“Granniana, Rita honey. It’s not an endearment, Rita-tita. You’re my Rita-tita. My grandmother is just Granniana, that’s her name. Nobody calls her anything else. You don’t need to call her Grandma Granniana. Just call her Granniana like I call you Rita. She’s modern in that sense, just like you and me.”

Rite maybe was over-tired and had picked enough apples for the day, poor thing – although we had not yet picked enough for the order the charity organisation “Couples In Need” had made to us.

I used to sometimes imagine Rita’s ex-husband had secretly been killed by her and that it had not been by accidental food-poisoning like was in the papers.

Rita kept saying everything was bogus, everything about Granniana, over and over again, and she never started to break out and laugh about herself.

“Over eighty. A bylaw! Swings on trees! What bogus! Barney!”

It seriously started to kill some of my nerves and that’s how I stopped feeling so painfully irritated perhaps. Rita became a neurot so easily. A neurot was what we called each other for short, to tease each other – sometimes in a mean way. Rita was only neurotic when she got upset and lost her temper. She kept saying the same thing over again.

“No but it’s not bogus,” I assured, the word being one I had never taken in my mouth before. “It’s true. My grandmother is well over eighty.” I was a guy who was usually weak as if I was the one of us who was the weaker sex, which was why Rita liked me so much and we were the perfect match. Plus, I was soothing to her neurotic nerves, and I was benefited by her numbing my nerves.

Granniana had not said a word. Probably because she did not feel herself addressed to. Rita had not even glanced over to her, not once the whole time. She was only turned to me. This was actually a good thing, because this way, Rita wasn’t in the way of the wind which was airing and drying Granniana’s skirts. Granniana did not know of toilets, not while she was in the wilderness which can be a giant toilet bowl when you need it to be – without the irritating splashes.

Next, Granniana just decided to take over and began in a ‘hello boys and girls’ voice: “Imagine this. I am over eighty by now. Anyway, I don’t think you have any age anymore after eighty-six. Barney, how old am I now? See, he doesn’t know either. You only get younger, they say to me. It’s the nicest thing anyone can say – anyone who says that to me will be forgiven any rudeness or lack of courtesy. I am sure you hear it all the time yourself – you must have expected me to have said it to you but you must understand I had been waiting for you to say it to me first! Ha! . . . Well, well, let me look at the two of you! My grandson marrying someone already over forty! And he isn’t even thirty yet himself. Well, at least you’ll be the elder sister he never had, and I’m so pleased, it’s just what he needs. My grandson has always needed to be mothered or grandmothered, ever since he was a baby. You look like you could be his mother. How old are you? Well, at least you haven’t got grey hair yet. Barney’s mother has grey streaks and doesn’t bother dying them. But you dye your hair. I might disapprove of you as a match for my grandson if you have grey hair and look like his granny. Only I am ever going to be his granny, I’ll tell you that!” Granniana was having the time of her life wallowing in her particular taste for – er, playfulness. “And so how old are you?” – asking as if she were suddenly asking a four-year-old.

Rita of course was over thirty-five and the kind who wasn’t so down-to-earth about admitting her age. She could have been forty-five, I thought at times, although I usually never mentioned to Rita what I thought, in general. I didn’t know how old she was. I had told her how old I was. I told her from the start when we first met that I was only twenty-seven and too young for her but we could be friends. She wouldn’t accept that.

“It’s Bogus, it’s bogus, that’s bogus,” Rita kept on saying. Of course, this is one of the most unique things about her. It’s worthwhile going on about it.

Later on, at her Psychiatrist’s – we found out that Rita had a sort of mania for venting her feelings through one word, one particular word, and it might go on for hours, days. I thought that interesting. It had not been the reason, though, why we broke up a few weeks later.

It made me feel extra good being needed for my patience and being just what a neurotic person needs. But maybe I was sick myself.

Granniana herself was beginning to show symptoms of tiredness. So I got an idea . . . I took both ladies by the arm and started walking them back to the house. When I realized they were both mental, I just burst out laughing.

Laughing and laughing, but nobody else laughed. Just in case Rita was still hurt about the age and compliments thing, I hugged her tight to make her all young again – or so I wished I could lend her some youth from my arms. “Aw, and Rita, I say you look younger! I say you look younger. Why is it so important for you women to look younger than you are? You know I love you and we’re getting married even though you might be forty, or I don’t know – If you don’t tell me how many years you’ve lived, I won’t tell you how many girls I went out with that month you and I were in an open relationship.”

Chapter 2: Granniana the Brain

What was much more normal was when I started going out with a girl who my sister used to baby-sit as a newborn. That’s not really such a big age difference – it just sounds like it, but it was something I often smirked about. She still wasn’t someone as remarkable as my grandmother and someone I would write about. Anyway, the love that I had for my grandmother just wasn’t to ever be beaten by a romantic kind of love anyway. And the attraction was just a different kind, with different drives. I was driven to loyalty to my Grandma but had a different kind of loyalty to women I dated.

Nobody could be outstanding in personality like my grandmother. Most people were boring compared to her. I guess it’s the family tie. By nature I’ve realized I actually really am a bachelor who cannot be uprooted from his family. My family ties come first and it’s a good thing I never actually got married or it would have been an unhappy marriage on both sides.

To tell you the truth, I had been hoping something was going to go wrong with Sandy. She was very unlike Rita but I kind of knew it wasn’t going to work anyway. She had never been married or engaged before, maybe that was it. I was her first boyfriend. She was not so sexy and she wasn’t rich, but she was like a little girl and hair like sand and dazzling turquoise eyes. I gave her a turquoise and not diamond ring, and this was why she had said “yes” to me in the first place. At least this is what she confessed when we were breaking up. But it had been entirely different back when she had said “yes” to me. She had even cried. And, so close to me through her passionate tears, she had whispered that the turquoise ring made her feel that I loved her so much.

The engagement ring was very unique and special, a lot more than she was unique and special if you ask me – I mean, it’s just that besides her turquoise eyes, there are quite a lot of girls who look like her. I often used to get mixed up when we went out somewhere. Especially in those darker night clubs there are a lot of girls who looked just like her. Of course I’d recognize her by what she was wearing – and when that failed, it was the eyes. It was because every human being has a unique soul and eyes are supposed to be windows to the soul. Sandy had turquoise eyes. Real turquoise eyes.

It’s just so much like women to just go and twist everything the other way and accuse me of having loved her only because of her eyes! This was how the breaking up began.

“They’re not even real, your eyes!” was what I had said back to her. I was fuming mad. “You lied to me and I believed six months your eyes were really turquoise. What should you do that for? Don’t you believe I would love you no matter what kind of eyes you have? So this is how you think of me . . . Someone who only sees you on the outside and not on the inside.”

I’ll never forget – it was an ugly consequence that followed. Maybe it was my fault. I’ve never had contact lenses in my life. I did not know they could be used for a woman’s self-defence. Sandy somehow shoved them up my nose! I couldn’t see them coming because of course they’re just two small little plastic dots. Because of the blasting heaters in the car, I had already been afraid my nose was going to start cracking inside and bleed all over the place.

What I resorted to do next was snort and of course drill my fingers in both sides to try to get them out. I could not persevere for long because of the pain and the blood that started dripping like ketchup. Sandy tried to help with a Q-tip.

“Ew – Barney, what’s all that stuff coming out of your nose?!” she squealed. I grabbed hold of the Q-tip she was drilling up my nose with and snapped it in two. And that, I tell you, had been the perfect metaphor for what it was that had snapped inside me: my usual world-record-lasting patience. “It’s blood. Are you colour blind? Can’t you smell?”

She started spitting and croaking as if she were choking on it, just because she got a taste of some of the blood off my fingers when I smeared some over her face. She just had to be so provocative and respond saying, “Nice taste, Barney” – in a whiney voice.

I got really mad at this. “Oh, so my nose bleeds and boogers don’t please your tastebuds either.” My voice usually never got so loud. “Earlier you said the lasagne I made ain’t good enough for you; even though I made sure the extra cheese on top stayed gooey and didn’t turn crisp, not even on the edges. And it’s not only when it comes to food, Sandy. Everything’s ‘nice taste, Barney. What you mean is I have bad taste. In clothes. The girls I like walking past us on the street. Everything about me is just wrong. Why did you ever like me in the first place? What did you like about me before? What, what, what??!”

I thought for a moment, she really did look better with her real coloured eyes, which were a rich chocolate brown.

“Answer me!” I have to tell you, we might not have gotten nowhere had I not resorted to anger like this.

Finally: “Nothing,” she almost whispered, the stuff out of my nose streaked across her mouth and some in her hair. It was really repulsive. “Nothing.” She looked pretty scared of me. “Nothing. There’s nothing . . . I like or – ever liked about you – nothing.”

She had her hand on the handle of the car door, in case I was not beginning to be appeased.

But her reply did in fact calm me down the more it sunk in, I guess. All I had wanted to hear from her was that there was nothing she liked about me, so then all bonds could just be cut naturally and there’d be no pain. So that’s what happened. There was nothing I liked about her either, and I told her that. We were at peace after that. I drove her home.

When I went to complain to my Granny Granniana the next day – well, not just to complain but to seek permission for what herbal cleansers she might have to purge my nose tract, I’m afraid I was not taken seriously. All my grandma did was stare and then chuckle, and suddenly whack my bottom across with her wooden kitchen chopping board – as if it was my fault, but it wasn’t. Then she cackled in between a hoarse mystic voice,

“My Grandson. Barney Orchard. We’re going to have to sit down together, calmly. Everything – calmly. There you are. Why, you’re grown up now, aren’t you? How old are you? How can I have forgotten? Even been engaged four times! Forget about the age. And you’re back at home, just like in the old days. Ye-es, you’re with granny, and you’re at home. Not to worry about a thing. Dearie dear . . . what this needs is a nice hot cup of cocoa. And right after that, we’re going to examine your stool.” Granniana could be charming and innocent like the cute and pretty old ladies that go to church. She so often would be talking about something that didn’t seem at first to be quite proper. Just above a young girl’s whisper, “You know, you might be accused of stealing something that isn’t yours. Why, we’d better get them out, those comfort lentils, before you might have to go to prison!! You never know what a little young lady might do straight after she’s been jilted so close to the altar. She might as well have reported you to the police already. You are going to return to her whatever belongs to her, or you’re no grandson of mine.

“What are you looking like that at me for, young man? You swallowed those comfort lentils, what do you think you did? What did they teach you at university about anatomy and digestion?” And her head came off at the back, suddenly – it appeared, with the violent rocket of cackles that took off. Her eyes disappeared inside the wrinkles. “Good you arrived just now and no later. About to put supper on the table I was. Your sisters are all away at camp, and your parents are on a date. It’s just you I’ll have to feed tonight. I’ve had a soft, easy meal planned – for myself, to my own taste, something I can chew on without teeth. The last thing I was expecting to put on the table tonight was your stool! That’s not soft and easy like my supper, I hope, or I might not know the difference between what’s on my table!” And she laughed some more. I laughed too. She winked. “Shouldn’t that be a soft and easy one? I hope it is.”

Okay, okay, she had gone on about this enough. “You know what, Granniana? Sandy said those contact lenses had cost her half her monthly petty cash. Even though we are broken up now, since last night, I still want to give them back. And even though – Granniana, it wasn’t fair what she did to me. It was really unfair what she did.”

Granniana still was the same as before when I had been bullied in high school. It wouldn’t matter to you that she smelled so bad. When you laid your head on Granny’s lap, you were at your roots.

She was sometimes like a deep purring cougar; I think she had slight emphysema from Grandpa having been a chain-smoker. Her voice came now from under the earth and at my heart: “You know – we can clean them bright and clean as new. With – with some non-toxic, environmentally friendly cleaning spray for cleaning windows maybe. And I’m sure she’ll look out of them again as good as new. What made her have to wear comfort lentils in the first place anyway? Was it just so she could have pretty eyes?”

And then, all we found were fragments of those coloured contact lenses. Bits. My stomach had been too hard on them. It had been unintentional. All this fuss and mess looking for them in my stool for nothing! Granniana saw modern technology too much as science fiction.

“Look at that colour!” she had marvelled with rounded, white eyes poking out from over the mask for spraying round-up she had been wearing at the table. I had told her it was too risky to use a fork. Later on, I started accusing Granniana for having torn Sandy’s contact lenses. My stomach could not have done it. My stomach had loved Sandy with all the butterflies it used to have fluttering around inside whenever I would picture those turquoise eyes. Do you think maybe it was those turquoise contact lenses that I loved and not her eyes? I loved those contact lenses. Well, it was the combination together with her eyes. Sandy wasn’t Sandy without her contact lenses – that’s the bottom line I guess.

Chapter 3: Granniana Goes to the Beauty Salon

There was no point in hiding the truth of what happened to those contact lenses from Sandy. I knew, that weekend, Sandy would be at Granniana’s facial salon. It had been a tradition ever since we started going out that my grandma and my girlfriend went to the same facial salon on the same day.

I could only phone her, since we naturally did not want to meet and talk in person ever again. I told her over the phone about her shredded up lenses. I told her that it had been Granniana with her fork going through my stool on the table and asked her if I could just pay her whatever they had cost. But then just she hung up.

I was always the one out of my family to accompany Granniana for her appointment there. Whether Sandy was going to be there or not, I had to go.

Wheeling Granniana from the car to the salon, in her wheelchair, I knew all was right with the world despite its heart aches. We gazed together with pointed hands at the fancy writing lit by florescent lights: Age-Choppers. Granniana didn’t think this was original enough. “It’s Facial Saloon”, she quipped. That’s what she liked to call it, just for fun. “In the olden days, women went to saloons to get their wrinkles treated with the foam off beer,” she explained. “They don’t show that in Western Movies, though.”

Other women were walking and passing us by. They looked at us but without a smile – not because we were strangers, but because they already knew us.

“Can we go a bit faster?” Granniana muttered under her breath.

“Sure,” I replied. “Wanna go beat that one lady over there about to open the entrance door?”

Granniana cackled a “yaah!” and we raced past everyone – all those ladies walking ahead of us . . . Granniana leaning forward and prankishly throwing apples at them – from a basket of apples (they were from our farm). Nobody got hurt, of course. She knew she could get away with it because she was an old lady and in a wheelchair. (What would you do if you saw an old senile woman in her wheelchair throwing apples at you? You couldn’t really get mad at her, could you?)

Before all the apples in the basket were thrown away by Granniana and wasted, I got to hand the basket of apples to the receptionists. Granniana gave them apples every time she came. There were five of them, all smiling in their unique ways with every one of them their unique personalities and shades of colour and shape. They were the prettiest and the youngest receptionists you can imagine, with glossy, beautiful faces and quality make-up.

“Apples,” Granniana said as an aside to them. “Apples, that’s my secret, girls. I’m actually thirty-five, you know but look at my skin! My secret home remedy for age: a sack of apples a day keeps those wrinkles away.” It was really funny how she exaggerated the word sack in particular. The reception girls all laughed, of course. They all knew Granniana wasn’t thirty-five. She was eighty-six and for eighty-six she really had more wrinkles than was normal. That was mainly what she went to get treatments for.

Inside those “Granniana Baskets”, as the receptionists called them, there were quite a few different kinds of apples.

“Whoever was Granny Smith, I’m Granni-ana! Who do you like more, Granny Smith or me?” She pretended to become dark and a grim granny. “Speak! For a Granny Smith apple is the only one you’ll never find in a Granniana basket.

“They say the kind of taste you like best is what you are, too. Have you heard about it? I like’em sweet and juicy. So that means I’m sweet and juicy. Right? How about you? If it’s Granny Smith you like then that means you’re sour or a tart! You’re the kind that look like you’re tarts!” The receptionists loved her. They didn’t take anything seriously.

In fact, I wished the beauticians, if not the receptionists, would take her seriously, as a senior citizen, at least, not to mention a client.

Granniana was always too tactful for her own good. She wasn’t the kind of client that came in a store and let everybody know she was somebody. She couldn’t say what she wanted when she was at a shop. And so she was what is called a passive client, like maybe makes a good kind of client.

But Granniana knew very well how to actively stare wide-eyed at what was happening, every moment – inquisitively and bending over as far as she could to watch the beautician filing her toenails. It was funny to see how her eyes suddenly protruded more than they already protruded – and to her convenience. You can see a lot farther if your eyes pop out of their sockets a bit. Nevertheless she still was taken advantage of. People didn’t pay attention to her eyes and what those eyes tried to say to them. People thought Granniana’s eyes were something to look away from.

At the facial saloon, Granniana was always given a magazine by the beautician to look at. Today, the beautician even interrupted her work at the third toe nail on the right foot to go get a magazine for Granniana to look at. There were maybe twenty magazines already stacked in a block on her lap. Granniana replied, “Thank you,” with an obliged nod. Ironically, the stack actually made it a lot more comfortable for Granniana to lean on as she crouched forward. And with an extra addition of an extra thick volume of “Vague” magazine, a particular disc of her spinal column suddenly lifted. A spinal column lift could make you feel a lot better than a face lift could, at least that’s what was apparent in Granniana’s face.

It really was a beauty salon here and not a facial salon – not because there weren’t operating tables for clients to come sit at for an operation, but it wasn’t a facial salon because what most women came here for was to have some changes made to their feet. And their hands. Only three hours of your age therapy session went to your face. Feet were four, and hands were five hours. ‘Beauty isn’t so much in the face,’ as they say, now in the nineties. You have to show so much more skin than in the olden days when only the obvious professional prostitutes were permitted to show neck and ankles. As all women know, it is not only the face that needs to be worked on for beauty. Granniana even went once for a bikini shave, but never again she decided.

Granniana knocked down her stack of magazines piled on her lap. The beautician, a dark-haired Latina woman a bit unsmiling and serious about her work, had to pick them up all up herself. “What do you want, you old wrinkle monster?”

“Thank you for asking me what I want,” was Granniana’s well-pronounced response. Granniana could act the active client when she wanted to”. “What I want is a rose-pink nail polish for my toe nails.” Yet she had not the courage to look the beautician in the face. “What I want my toe-nails to be is rose-pink, the colour of my favourite colour for roses and not that preposterous neon-colour which my grandchildren say is the fashion now – It won’t do for an old lady like me. But if my grandchildren will see me wear it they suddenly will say it’s the “old-fashioned” colour and ‘when are you going to grow-up, granny?’ I don’t want that new colour, it’ll look old-fashioned on me. No, no, please not that new colour, will you put it away, miss?”

The beautician did not answer. I didn’t blame her, Granniana in her senility could not always say things that made perfect sense. Instead the beautician stirred aggressively so that the brush going on Granniana’s first toe nail would be extra thick of that neon stuff.

“I don’t like those felt markers my grandchildren draw with over every sentence in their text books from school,” Granniana added. “Funny, isn’t it? It appears to me you wish to highlight my toe nails as if it’s something to learn off by heart.” Granniana paused to wait for a reaction. The beautician began painting. Granniana could not pull her toe nail away because she knew that was ill behaviour at a facial salon. “I don’t forget to keep my toes out of the way of the cars before it’s safe to cross the road. Or maybe I do forget sometimes?”

The way it appeared to me, Granniana was speaking to a dead person. “I said I don’t like those felt markers.” Granniana then sniffed her nose at the beautician as if she smelled funny. “You know what? If you don’t mind my saying something that I shouldn’t say because it isn’t nice at all? I cannot resist telling you that . . . that I think the last time you were here they didn’t wax your ears properly. There’s too much hair growing inside your ears, I can tell. Isn’t there a hair-removal cream you can apply to end that?”

Perhaps it took an offensive comment in order for a beautician to listen to her client. She finally looked up at Granniana in a way as if it was Granniana's fault she was being delayed in getting her work done.

“You can call me whatever you think I look like to you. You can say I’m in stage one of decay. But I’m not alone.” Granniana paused, holding her tongue for a while to gather her composure. “Society can do with us decaying folks what it likes, to get even with us because we get benefits from the government and everywhere we go, even half price for the bus. I used to envy senior citizens for getting discounts when I was younger. And then, I finally got there myself. I do admit it is an enviable age to be at, however sometimes people don’t seem to listen to what you say and things like that. That’s the only nuisance apart from people like you, thank you very much.”

Granniana then sat back, folding her hands at her chest which was where the top of the heavy stack of magazines came up to, and sat back deep in her high black leather chair, well-pleased with her speech.

A minute later, heads of all ages at the salon turned and looked. Granniana was talking to them. “You’ll get there, every one of you, just wait and see. As sure as the wrinkles have started, you’re heading there . . . as sure as you’re also heading to catch cancer from all these chemicals you inhale everyday here.

“One thing, little Missus. Take it easy on how generous you are to thicken my toe nails with that liquid felt marker. Make sure you have enough of that disgusting colour for my finger nails too, please. You might as well have my fingernails matching my toes. Just forget my whole request of wishing the rose-pink. I trust your better judgement of taste. Thank you.” She looked down and turned the first page of what Granniana called “Vague” magazine.

Let me tell you of – not so long ago – when I had made a challenge to the salon, personally, confrontation-style, asking them if they hated my Grandmother just because she was a Senior Citizen. I asked the manager, Gladys, if she herself was just like everybody else in this day and age who don’t think old people should invest in their future and their health because they haven’t long to live in this world anyway.

Another time I engaged in a dialogue with the manager Mrs. Gladys Lobster and it went like this: “Can my grandmother never be asked her choice of what she would like her nail polish to be?” I asked the manager of this beauty salon straight off. “Is it just because she is paying only 30% and the rest is subsidized by the government? You’re getting your pay just the same.” That’s what I said. I normally never talked this way, but my temper had just snapped. It was already after seven years of Granniana being a client to “We Age-Choppers”. The manager, Gladys, was American.

“Oh, don’t worry, it’s none of her business,” she assured me, gushing with lip gloss a Barbie pink and thick eyelashes. “It’s our business. So why don’t you just leave it all up to us?” She made a pout and looked just like the models on magazine covers. “Let us have the business. We love your old bag of wrinkles to bits, and she’s so great to work with!” Then she laughed and began miming an action of working with a bag of wrinkles as if it were a batch of sticky dough or something. She was a high-spirited young-lady. That was what had kept her looking young and fresh even after her tissues had been undergoing constant plastic surgery for thirty years. “Are you going to let it be our business what colour of nail polish we put on her or are you planning on taking over? Mr. Hottie-face?”

That is how it usually ends up, doesn’t it? Your sudden boldness to challenge the manager will always fire back at you. Anything you say will be turned against you. I think that is part of their managering skill. They can manage anything that comes at them: spit-balls, candy-canes, police threats, and even the worst confrontational complaint.

Sandy, my X, had pouting lips done that turned out looking just like Gladys’, the manager. They had been operated by the same surgeon when Sandy turned eighteen.

There she was, the same old Sandy puppy-dog, sitting just like she used to in tanning chairs by the swimming pool. She never missed an appointment. She was the only woman here who was stunning and the youngest – though not necessarily the youngest looking. Her face was glossier than any of the glossy-faced receptionists. Sandy always complained she had a greasy face and her oil glands produced more grease than normal. She couldn’t go anywhere without her compact face powder and she could never have enough storage supply of it at home. She said it was stress. And with an oil production at four millilitres per hour, according to her dermatologist’s clinical test, those tiny streaks of pimple growth over her beautiful T-zone (which we all have: from forehead to nose, chin, and across under our eye-bags) had optimal climate conditions for continuous cultivation. But I used to think she was really cute that way. It created a sort of fuzzy-wuzzy highlight over her face.

Sandy was having her fingernails and hand-skin surface blanched – that means whitened over boiling water, so I identified. This was her fourth hour, by the looks of it. Her face was glossy as if she had been at the gym, but I knew it was all those grease beads coming out. She just didn’t have anyone to remind her to give those naughty pores some powder-clogging. You had to be quick to stop gushing grease squirts.

Sitting in the black, leather, comfy chair, I was having the most restful day of my life since the last appointment I had come for a few months ago. I watched how Granniana had been sleeping all through the time that her feet were being treated. They had shed an approximate three-millimetre layer of dead skin cells. They were measured, before and after, with a milimillimetre measuring tape which was dark yellow. Those feisty beauticians had scrubbed down to my grandma’s baby-skin. I caught Granniana smiling with a sort of snicker in her peaceful, thick sleep, as if she were being tickled. I wondered if it didn’t hurt.

They woke her up when it came to the face massage. The face-massage was meant to smooth out all her hanging wrinkles and invigorate them. It took three beauticians to do this. Two pulled one flap to the side and it reached past her ears. The third beautician, who was new and was supposed to scrub them, looked really surprised that Granniana’s skin could do this. It wasn’t surprising to me. Granniana, at home, could pull her skin to make two noses beside her real one, or one gigantic Hansel and Gretel Witch’s nose. She could hide three large pearl necklaces inside the folds of her neck wrinkles. And, playing with children when a guest at people’s houses, Granniana could flap her cheekbone skin upwards, press down some of her forehead skin over her eyes . . . and then: “peek-a-boo!”

“Mrs. Granniana Orchard.” It was the supervisor, the clinical beautician who was more of a doctor. I hadn’t seen her all day. She was really fifty-seven but her skin was fifteen years old. As smooth as any fifteen year old. Granniana had made a comment once hinting it might have been a transplant from some poor fifteen year old who sold her skin. You could only tell her real age by her wrinkly, acid-roughed hands with the spidery long fingers and the saggy-skinned, turkey-throat-like wrists coming out of her white chemistry-lab dress. And maybe by the double chins underneath her teenager smooth upper chin which kept sagging despite her regular operations. The last one was just healing, I spied.

“Good evening, Madame Sauce,” saluted Granniana, giving the fifteen-year-old one of her dazzling toothless smiles. “Thank you for finally coming over to see me. Am I going to have my mask now?”

“Yes, you are. Which one?” replied the cool and moody-toned Madame Sauce with the teenager face. Her name of course wasn’t Madame Sauce, it was Ms. Ever Young she was called by everybody – kind of a hippy name. Granniana got away with giving people names sometimes.

“I’d like the soothing one, please, not the clay mixture – that makes my skin crack. Or … let’s make it the Dead Sea salt one,” piped Granniana, sitting taught in her chair and clapping her hands.

Ms. Ever Young could speak though not without difficulty. “No, no, no,” she said, – very quick but without moving her lips. “Mrs. Orchard, I’m afraid the salt will sting those abrasions on your face from the dead-skin-cell-scraping that was done for you today. You don’t want to worsen the abrasions with Dead Sea salt. Salt is corrosive to human flesh, you know. I don’t know how many more years you wish to keep your face and not get a face replacement altogether – which you know Dr. Mikhailovitch talked with you about, but you prefer going the more natural route. Treating age does cost a lot of money, I agree with you there. It is going against nature – using natural methods and remedies wherever possible.

“On the positive side, ehe, the salt acts as a disinfectant to prevent any of those crusty yellow infections your poor face collected the other year. So, instead of rubbing alcohol and ammonia to disinfect your face, we can use the Dead Sea salt. It is your choice.”

Deep in the comfy black leather seats, I was impressed at the professionalism around here, but crossed my fingers that Granniana would say no to the Dead Sea salt.

“Do you think me dim-witted?” Granniana returned. She patted her cheek-skin, which had been so invigorated by the scraping that she looked a lady in her seventies, not in her eighties. “Really, sometimes I don’t know if you’re only making a joke to make me laugh because you’re that kind of person who likes to make people laugh – or is this part of the treatment here at this salon? A laughing treatment. I don’t suppose there is any better way to face every torture one must go through here. The face stretching, the needles, the face-clips, the burning. Just laugh! Laugh about everything!” Oh no. Granniana really knew how to laugh and her voice went higher and higher so that some of the other torture patients turned around to face her. They evidently did not believe in quick laughing treatments. Laughter doesn’t come that easily to everyone. Blessed are those who can laugh.

“Wouldn’t it be better if women simply could laugh at each other’s faces whenever they saw each other? Say, ‘oh my, your mouth is really hanging crooked – oh my, and look at what age has done to your lips, you look like a turtle with a sharp beak for a mouth now.” Granniana’s right green eye gleamed and the supervisor returned back the gleam with a gleam from inside a black-and-blue decorated eye.

“Well, Mrs. Orchard, the more pain, the more beauty. Some women feel they cannot be beautiful unless they undergo pain first. They were not born beautiful. Have you ever seen new born babies? Hideous. Speaking for myself, Mrs. Orchard, I am never more satisfied with my inner beauty than when the bandage and gauze come off my face after a surgery and in the mirror I can see a satisfyingly violently cut up face staring back at me.”

Granniana knew how Madame Ever Young always was trying to rub in the sad fact that Granniana couldn’t have plastic surgeries herself because she was too old.

“Thank you; let us return our attention to my painful beauty, please. I’ve decided for the rubbing alcohol and the ammonia. No Dead Sea salt for me, dear. And then, the nutritious milk and honey – I’m tired of spending all my day here with you people, I want to go home.” She sighed; really tired. Her voice became low, rough and with the edge of briskness. “With my mask. I’ll have my mask please. The new one I’ve ordered in advance and paid with Barney’s credit card. I’ve forgotten all about it! I’ve remembered now! Ms. Young, why did you not have it written down with you? Are you scheming to try to get me to buy more products while I’m here?”

Ms. Ever Young was really a pleasant, polite young lady. “Why, certainly, Mrs. Orchard.” It was as if she were praising Granniana for her clever purchase. “As you wish and as you will. The customer is always right.” She flicked her slender spider-leg claws.

I was relieved when Madame Ever Young left the room. But then she came back, pushing a metal tray on wheels, the kind they have in hospitals for room service. It had lettuce leaves all along the top borders and four crystal bowls around it piled with cucumber. Those were to go around all the ladies still at the parlour waiting so long to come out of their beauty-processing moulds. Cucumber slices came around as little bonus treats – free-bees, the classic soother for the eyes, you know. The second round was carrots – baby carrots, to treat the inside of your ears because of the noise from the equipment. Last time I had been here there had been fresh tomato for eyelash roots but this wasn’t going around today. Fresh tomato is supposed to make your eye-lashes grow longer.

The tray on wheels drove around with a beaming round lid of metal on it. There was a knob handle on the top of it and this was the sculpture of an animal’s head – but it was not a turkey’s head. You could not expect a turkey to be served under that round metal room-service lid, could you? Not at a facial salon! The knob handle was a sculpture of a popular television classic, Miss Piggy from the Muppet Show. You know, Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog? I laughed. What a great relief from all the professionalism around here.

Granniana’s eyes sparkled youthful with anticipation – to tell you the truth, to Granniana, a beauty mask and roast turkey were the same thing. That’s how excited she was.

Ms. Ever Young lifted the round silver lid . . . and there it was: a mask for Granniana. Small little crab apples and lettuce leaves giving it frills going all around. The mask lay limp on its silver platter, inside out – so it appeared from where I was standing, and was smeared with finest pale yellow honey and milk.

The mask was put on Granniana’s face. This month she had the face of a twelve-year-old.

The mask had been made through computer technology, researching in the past what Granniana had looked like when she was twelve years old. Granniana at twelve years old.

She kept her hair the way it was, though, white, streaked and grey – no one was allowed to dye her hair, and anyway, dying hair wasn’t done at facial salons because of the harmful chemicals.

This youth and beauty mask Granniana went home with. The honey and milk on the inside of it was soothing and helped the mask to stick. The honey was one with a high oxygen-concentrate which would rejuvenate her skin at the same time and supply it with more oxygen than air could. It was a special honey, the highest quality natural glue. It was included in Granniana’s invoice – it wasn’t just any ordinary honey from the supermarket.

In a week’s time, the mask would begin to look like it was melting.

The last time she had worn a mask – semi-permanent masks they call these, Granniana had walked around like about seventeen or eighteen years old. After one week . . . she was still a teenager, though she became one with clear-coloured acne. Not red and pussy infected like most teenagers, at least. Instead of drying up and clearing with time, these acne bumps grew longer and longer with every day.

By week two, you could mistake Granniana’s face for a massive dripping candle. Of course, the family helped trim the eyelids with clippers so the poor young woman could still look out and go about living a normal life.

Granniana only ordered a mask at the beauty parlour a few times a year for this reason: the downside of the embarrassing melting.

Nobody else, of course, is crazy like my Grandma and wears masks to look years younger. But the inventor of these masks, her name is Mrs. Beverly Sooke – she orders one to wear every month. There is an expensive beauty salon on Lake Como, Italy where Beverley Sooke creates masks you can purchase and own that are permanent and not Granniana’s semi-permamanent monthly disposals. Except, these permanent ones you wear next to your face, not on. Left or right of your head. You can choose a replica of your face at any age you like, even older.

Granniana thought it would be humiliating if she would try to wear a mask to look older. Even ridiculous, she said. She made fun of the women she saw wearing these. Of course, rarely would you see any woman walking around with an older version of her face next to her real face – these were easier to make, however, and were cheaper. Back in the nineties there was a celebrity who was featured frequently in the Vague magazine wearing this. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Sarah Comely, the singer who rose to fame when she married her producer? Well, the producer was thirty-something years older than her, and this was a good reason for her to have a face closer to his age, like for when they went out and had pictures taken together. Of course, it made three faces for the picture, side by side at the temples, in different arrangements, even though they were a couple with only two real faces. You’d see in the celebrity magazines, even front cover, Sarah Comely young and her husband old with Sarah Comely old in the middle. Or whatever order, it didn’t matter.

Rather than making fun of celebrities who wore the mask to look older, Granniana made fun of the local women in our town who acted like they were celebrities and wore the permanent masks beside their faces to look younger, no matter if they were all the ones who drove the most expensive cars and who walked around as if they had the money to buy the globe on teacher’s desk in the town’s elementary school.

“Your mask is ridiculous!” Granniana had to tell them. “I think you just want the mask so we’ll believe those old starlet photos you’ve got in your wallet! Isn’t it? Now that you’ve got this mask, it doesn’t matter so much anymore that you had to grow OLD?!” And she’d cackle away, leaving the poor ladies annoyed and disturbed. But usually, they would just dismiss her as a crazy, senile woman and take for themselves all the laughter they could get out of it (Health Food Specialists say you should laugh a lot, by the way. Laughter is the best way for a liver detox, and it’s cheaper than health food. That’s why a lot of Health Food Stores sell comic books in the front of the shop where you go to pay. Sometimes with a free bottle of liver detox tincture).

If you laugh enough, whatever age you are, it also allows more oxygen to flow to your face and you might never need a mask like what Granniana spent so much of her pension money on. And you wouldn’t become jealous like she became jealous of those rich ladies who could afford permanent masks.

Sometimes the sole reason women go for face-lifts is for the fun of it. Granniana’s youth masks were just for the fun of it too.

The best part of the mask was getting it off. The mask itself was made of a kind of honey that was half honey and half wax. The wax was 100% organic and had maple syrup in it. Granniana would peel off her mask and eat it. I’ve tasted it too but she usually won’t share any. She says it gives you gas.

Chapter 4: Granniana’s Radical Health Diet

One of the things we as kids thought the normal thing about Granniana for nearly as long as I can remember growing up were the stomach aches she got nearly every day at around four o’clock in the afternoon. Of course, when we were older, we could see that it wasn’t such a normal thing. When we were little, it was just part of the day, kind of like a TV show that came on whether you were there to watch it or not. We sometimes went to see her, scrunched up on the floor – usually in the kitchen. That’s how much pain she’d be in. It would last about twenty minutes, that was all. Later though, our poor old Gran would have to take it easy, lounge around. This was when we knew she had the time and the softness inside to give us lots of attention. We’d come to her with all the things we had crafted that day. New things we had learned. Some funny jokes. We loved this time with our Granny. It was the grandest thing when Granniana got her stomach aches. Our mother never properly told us anything about them and why they happened. I did have to figure out though when I got older, that it must have something to do with what Granniana ate.

Everyday Granniana ate sausage for breakfast. With mustard because in Germany they say mustard makes you cheeky – their word for it though sounds almost exactly like “fresh”. Granniana had never been to Germany but she used to know an old German man who ate sausage and all the bad stuff and got colon cancer and died. Never mind the colon cancer risks, Granniana argued that sausage and mustard made you fresh and confident in the morning.

Since Granniana was our grandma and the eldest in the house and it was her house and her farm, she could get up in the morning whenever she liked. It usually was at five in the morning, just before all of us; so whatever she didn’t eat, the next early riser got to eat. When we children were growing up, we didn’t look forward to getting honey-comb cheerios or Special K for breakfast. We tottered to the sink where Granniana left her plate from her breakfast early in the morning with a few pieces of sliced sausage left over.

Nothing happened to our stomachs. Maybe it was because we had been eating it ever since the age we could digest solids. A scavenger’s treat. But my own diagnosis for why Granniana got her terrible stomach aches was because of those sausages (and I don’t have to be a doctor).

“It’s a special sausage,” she said. Do you want to know what it really was? It was old sausage – four years expired. It said so on the expiry date. Granniana had been eating these just so since she was seventy-one when she first started getting those terrible, mysterious stomach cramps. She had only begun eating this kind of sausage to treat a terribly upset stomach she got travelling on a bus to Mexico. She had brought a whole crate of them, already four years expired, on her way back home.

But Granniana also had a few other rational reasons for eating expired sausage: “Once you get old you gotter start lookin’ after yourself.”

You’ll remember that the mask Granniana got at the facial salon only lasted in beautiful form for one week. After that, it was acne. The second week, it was a dripping candle and quite like a monster. Well, that one time Granniana got her face back from when she was twelve years old, she got some phone calls from ladies replying to an ad Granniana had put up at her local supermarket: “Pick up your needle again! Join my sewing circle! Bring any scrap of fabric, dish cloth, just sew for the sake of sewing!” So two ladies came to join Granniana’s sewing circle. One of their daughters dropped them off. Both ladies were good friends and had the common problem of having their arms fall asleep holding the wheel.

Granniana of course had to remove her mask before they came. It was Mom who helped her pull it off.

“Put it in the fridge, I have no time to eat it,” Granniana told her, whisking her hand to the side. The guests who were coming in the next hour. “I’m not hungry anyway.”

“Why don’t you serve it to your guests?” Mom retorted, a bit cynical, flapping the miserable looking mask. She was exhausted from having had to pull off Granniana’s mask all on her own. I myself was busy on the computer.

My Mom’s comment then gave Granniana an idea. The only other thing in the house suitable to offer guests would be biscuits that had been left exposed to the air for about a week and had hardened beyond the point of even being able to break them with your hands.

“Make sure your stomach doesn’t start getting fussy about what you make it eat.” This is what Granniana told those two ladies when they sat down and saw the biscuits. They thought they looked delightfully good, but hadn’t tried them yet. “You ladies are only sixty-nine. Just wait till you’re seventy-one. That’s when your teeth start changing and your stomach and everything.” She sounded like a young girl talking about the amazing dolly her daddy got her, with ribbons, lace frills and eyes that opened and closed.

One of the ladies’ eyes twinkled with friendly mirth. “So is that how old you are, Granniana? Seventy-one?”

Granniana was quick to answer, “No. I’m eighty-six.” She looked away as the ladies picked up the biscuits. Then she met their polite smiles as they put down again what they could not bite through. I think they believed it was their own fault they couldn’t bite them through.

“When I was seventy-one, my teeth were still all there and just the same as when I used to crack walnuts open from the tree.”

The ladies nodded, a little sadness come into their eyes. And they were confused, since Granniana had earlier said at seventy-one everything goes wrong.

Granniana continued. “But then my stomach gave up a battle with pathogenic bacteria. All when I was seventy-one. It was on the bus travelling down to Mexico. Oh, I didn’t get sick in Mexico – though everybody else on the bus tour did. I got sick travelling on the way going there. The bus didn’t stop anywhere except for fast food. I never get motion sick. I just can’t eat fast food every day. On the bus on the way back to Canada, a best friend of mine, Wendy, said that the broths and purees at her nursing home were so much easier on her stomach than all that spicy sour cream they give you in Mexico. Their sour cream is spicier than their salsas. Don’t you find sour cream too spicy to add to your salsa?”

The two ladies looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders with well-amused smiles – they were a bit bewildered though and couldn’t speak.

“Well, my friends, she had trouble with her stomach the whole time – maybe it wasn’t the spicy sour cream, it was the water. But I’ll tell you what, nothing happened to my stomach – I didn’t get diarrhoea or anything, because . . .” Granniana always put her voice down to a whisper when she was about to say something in sensitive discretion. “I didn’t get diarrhoea because I already had diarrhoea the whole time on the journey there. Like I told you.” Granniana always thought twice about what she said – not before she said it, but after. “No. No, that wasn’t the reason why.” Granniana became a bit perplexed. She was old. She sighed and began anew. Her no’s were pretty heavy and going down in a long tunnel. “Nooo-OO. That wasn’t it. What was it again?”

This sparked the old ladies’ impatience. Granniana wrapped them around her baby finger just like a real storyteller. She even realized what she was talking about was something sensational. “I always want to know exactly why about everything. I’m a person with a mind of reason. I always need to know the reason for things. I’m a person with a mind of good reason. I like to always look at the good reasons for things – in particular. The reason I didn’t get diarrhoea once I arrived in Mexico was because of the sausages I ate!” Hands on her knees, and her sudden yelp gave the ladies a jolt. They already had been starting to mistrust Granniana for the things she said. And now she gave them the idea to not trust in her mind of reason – or in her mind of good reason – or whatever reason she had.

“These sausages were served to us for dinner when we finally got off the bus. It was at the hotel Buena Vista – it had a view over the slums of Mexico! I’m sure a long time ago when the hotel was first built, those slums weren’t there yet. It must have been a beautiful green field with blossom trees and Inca and Mayans living in peace and harmony next to each other in temples. Anyway. Back to the sausages! I asked the cook in the kitchen to please let me have a look at the package he had bought them in. I needed to have the sausages cleaned though, I told him. Disinfected in boiling water because I’m sensitive to germs, I told him. Do you know what I found out? Those sausages the hotel had served us were American sausages. They weren’t Mexican sausages. And they had been expired four years ago! It said so on the package – well I figured it out by reading the expiry date. Will you believe such a thing?!”

In response to this, an old lady of Mom’s sewing circle asked why Granniana didn’t wear dentures. I believe this question was related to the biscuits Granniana had served them to eat which were too hard to bite through. Granniana was too much of a show-off to admit that she was just showing off to the ladies how tough her own teeth were.

Granniana was wearing her glasses, all set to start sewing, of course. She tilted her head to the side, looking over her glasses in response to the question asked of why Granniana didn’t wear dentures. “It’s very interesting isn’t it? Yes, well, when I was very young, sausage was the only food I wouldn’t eat.” This is what Granniana said to avoid the topic. “The reason was that I always knew it’s dead carcass – the toughest thing to digest, with all its grains of bone, rubbery blood vessels, cartilage, animal muscle. Eat it and you can digest your rubber yellow kitchen gloves. Not that I would want to eat rubber gloves, of course.”

The ladies sitting sedately in their chairs suddenly widened their eyes with awakened interest, forgetting how Granniana didn’t answer their questions.

“Ha! And have you ever heard a little pun I’ve discovered in the word sausage? – It saws age. Sausage saws age straight in two! Good idea? Oh, you ladies are still too young to start going to Age-Choppers.” Granniana flopped her wrist at them, though it didn’t flop very well of course.

The visiting ladies really had come to do sewing or have a pleasant comfortable chat together as old ladies. Yet neither of them really remembered to start sewing. One of the old ladies, curly short white hair, twisting her needle and some red thread around her fingers in her lap, suddenly made a little scream sound. She had pricked her finger. Those ladies really wanted to finally start their sewing!

“You might think you’re old.” Granniana said, smiling wisely at them, exaggerating the decade of age difference between them. “You may think you’re quite old, but don’t forget how old I am! I’m a lot older than you.” She slapped her knee. “I am a lot younger than you are in spirit though.”

The ladies loosened up to a dutiful smile when Granniana showed she meant it in a good way. “I hope you don’t mind our time is up for sewing today – it’s already . . . look, it’s already four o’clock, and we said we would sew till four. Sewing is really boring to me. It’s for old ladies. I know I want to start a sewing circle but it’s mainly because I want to do something old ladies do. Maybe it’s growing up. Not sewing. Maybe I’m not ready to grow up yet.”

This made the old ladies nod their heads. Then chuckle despite how they were a little less humoured. Then they began laughing and were more relieved at the situation more than anything, perhaps.

Granniana raised a pointed finger, happy to amuse them. “We haven’t been sewing with needle and threads but we’ve been sewing pictures inside our heads! Heehee! Do you like that rhyme? Threads, heads? A little humour, that’s what freshens your mind. We don’t have to do a little sewing circle. Sewing circles are for old ladies. Young women nowadays don’t do the sewing circles like we used to as young girls. It’s completely out of date to have a sewing circle. I’ve been trying to fight my age. I’ve been doing all I can. And yet I still can’t stop myself. I didn’t mean to put up the ad for wanting to start a sewing circle. That was just as out of control as how my wrinkles started years ago. My granddaughter – my eldest one Claudia – told me it’s compulsive behaviour. She read that in a book.

“What I can do is recommend you as a classic to stop showing your signs of old age is the classic that my grandparents used to tell me, and everyone knew about it: A glass of whiskey a day in the morning. Then there’s also a clove of raw garlic before bedtime. Or what else have I heard? Oh! There’s two tablespoons of lard! I know it’s pig fat but you can’t really taste it if you eat it with . . . morning jam.” Granniana wasn’t disheartened when the sixty-nine year old ladies took a while to try to give an answer and then didn’t answer at all. Then, hushed, like an old woman in classics who was going to tell a secret, “If you want to know what it is for me . . . it’s insecticide. Just a variable dose – and not too much of it. And not every day. Just when I feel like it. And not to go with a meal, just with dessert. For me and my family. It’s true. I’m not joking now.”

Granniana, Granniana. She really lost her mind when there was something she was excited about. How was she going to keep these people interested in her sewing circle? They weren’t going to come back.

“Why insecticide?” Granniana just had to persevere convincing them. “Well, you gotta see it this way. It’s one of the only substances you truly need to consume in moderation because it can kill you even with what looks like a reasonable serving amount.” Granniana looked worried her guests were beginning to make judgements about her. “I’m not crazy. Insecticide can’t make you crazy.”

The ladies stared; then settled themselves a bit in their sofas to feel more comfortable. They looked quite like when very polite people are criticized and told to do things differently in their lives.

“Let me tell you though another reason why insecticide can be good for you – if you believe it or not – it is good for you, in small doses. Oh, come on Cathy, cheer up Lindsay. You’ll be surprised. It’s something very important.” And you’d be surprised how Granniana was not just showing off an old wives’ tale. She actually had been reading articles and keeping up with environmental and health documentaries on the news; did a part-time certificate course by distance learning on Environment and Health – without completing it. Insecticides, pesticides are a big part of the course, they’re in every module.

“There are so many toxins in the air nowadays. From our car exhaust fumes to cigarette smoke second hand – to first hand smoke, which is fresher. And there are toxins you get from your own perfume. The spray one, I mean, not your own personal smell.” Granniana snickered and her arms flew up suddenly – then dropped again. “Coco Channel – I sprayed my apple blossoms with it once, a few lanes of them. I just did it to tease the pests that were ruining my apple harvest that year. Then I began to spray them orchards with insecticide because I think the perfume made them eat the apples more.”

The ladies nodded, a bit marvelled and credulous.

“Do you know how carcinogous apples become when they’ve been sprayed with insecticides and pesticides? Once when I was shopping at an organic health food store, there was a man who said to some other people shopping there, ‘All those people buying their fruits and vegetables elsewhere ought to be shot dead, don’t they?’ Well, those people who eat sprayed fruit and vegetables and not from organic shops are all going to be killed by those fruits and vegetables anyway – someday, right?

“If you touch sprayed meat you might as well choke and die instantly so that other people can see what will happen to you down the line.” The ladies laughed out at this. Granniana chuckled herself. “It will be a blessing to us all,” she added. “What can there be left for us to eat?”

The ladies looked at each other, looked back at Granniana and their mouths were quivering with humour about to burst out.

“Recycling boxes!” spoke out Lindsay, her blue eyes glittering. She had eyes that glittered. “The blue boxes!”

They all laughed. They were having a good time now. The ice had broken.

“Waste baskets!” Cathy managed to utter from under those giggles. “Crumpled up paper in waste baskets! That’s what you can eat!”

Granniana let them laugh a while, and then had to get back to bringing her points across.

“And you know organic food is all so expensive!” she exclaimed. “It comes out to be double the inorganic food. In fact, the money I save buying inorganic food in one year makes the price of a trampoline – did you know that? I’ve got one. The big one of course. Did you see the one we have in the front garden?”

Granniana sighed. Cathy and Lindsay sighed too, they of course always became a little startled whenever Granniana would mention something out of character. And when Granniana stopped talking for a while, a little exhausted, she just sat smiling back at them with her good-natured warmth without more to say.

“Health is wealth,” Cathy felt she needed to say, to fill in the gap.

Granniana was quick and started again. “We all know health is wealth.” She took it further. “But you need to be toxin-free if you want to have your health is wealth. There are so many harmful substances out there, even if you decide to just live off air, you won’t have your health is wealth.”

Cathy and Lindsay appeared to have heard this plenty of times before.

“You can never really live a toxin-free life,” Graniana assured them. “But you can become toxin-tolerant, that’s what. It’s a long process, though, just like evolution. It could take hundreds of years, I guess.”

The ladies laughed, Granniana too.

“Anyway, I might have sixty more years for it, if I take care of myself! In the end, I’ll be completely toxin-tolerant!”

The ladies whooped.

In between the whoops, Granniana added, “I started when I was sixty-nine!” You haven’t seen old women whooping with laughter like it was all they were going to get before the sun would go down! “Oh, you’ll have to listen to what my system is though! I’m serious, girls.”

The ladies of the sewing circle had come to do sewing. They certainly had come for something far better! But they certainly wouldn’t have come if they’d have known about Granniana drinking insecticide! They had no idea that Granniana’s system toxic-intolerance-building very much had to do with insecticide. “One important thing you need to know, girls. No matter all the predictions you hear and read about how the human race is going to die out poisoning the animals and plants and the earth and the air and one another . . . there’s a natural defence mechanism that can save us. I’ve figured it out. You should know what it is.”

The old ladies couldn’t nod in reply so just shrugged and smiled humbly. They weren’t the kind of old ladies who read those side-line newspapers telling news about cloning laboratories under a certain shopping mall, and that dogs have been cloned to talk and that the president of the United States has been cloned three times since the real one had been killed and replaced in between commercial breaks. There old ladies also weren’t the kind who confused the term natural defence mechanisms with emotional defence mechanisms or whatever. They were pretty bright-minded women, Granniana knew that. She usually didn’t entertain people for long if they weren’t at least a little bright-minded.

“The best natural defence mechanism we have is that we can adapt. That’s what it is. Our bodies can become tolerant, even to poison. My grandchildren even know that. They’re the ones who told me about this in the first place. No, it wasn’t my grandchildren. It was my grandchild. It was Anna Lisa. Only seven years old and only up to here. She came home from school one day. I was in the kitchen polishing my copper stove – do you know I bought that copper stove myself with the scholarship I had won to go to high school? I’ll show it to you in a minute. It had been for my mother, but when she died, I got it.

The nice old ladies nodded and showed their perpetual, girl-like interest in domestics. Then Granniana reminded them about her grandchild teaching her about adaptation.

“Our little Anna Lisa spread out her school books across the table, about to begin her homework. Nothing caught my attention until she called my attention talking about flies.

“‘Granny, do you know what makes flies better than us?’ You know of course, I couldn’t answer. I hadn’t been in school for over half a century. Anna Lisa said, ‘I learned flies can become resistant to the deadly chemicals put in insecticide spray to annihilate them. They gradually become immune because of their immune system. And all their children after them become immune, too – that’s evolution. And that’s why you have to keep changing the insecticide you spray on our farm, Granny.’

“That’s what made me start to think to myself: If flies can do this, so can I. Of course I have my family to think of, too.

“I don’t mean avoiding organic food and always and making sure you are eating sprayed and genetically modified food – checking ingredients for the worst additives and preservatives and the worse and the more the better! Avoiding products with signs: ‘GMO free” etc.” (Granniana laughed, and the ladies did too.) “I don’t think there are many people out there who go that extreme anyway! You don’t need to go from one extreme to another. If you want to adapt to toxins like the flies do, you have to do just what they do. No, you don’t have to spray insecticide on yourself like a body spray – it really doesn’t smell that great. I mean drinking the actual insecticide directly. Make sure it isn’t round-up though. Round-up kills weeds and I consider myself a weed.” Granniana hailed to it with her fist raised high. “I’m a hard to kill weed!” Her sewing circle acknowledged her their leader, smiling.

“Another important thing about living a healthy diet and life style is that you make every healthy thing you eat taste good, as if it could be chocolate pudding. So I mix the insecticide into deserts. And I make sure my diet consists of a mixture of organic and inorganic food. Never too much of either or. That’s my other motto – however commonly used it is by some people. Too much of anything is toxic. Too much of organic is toxic perhaps even worse than eating all sprayed and toxic because then your body loses immunity to toxins. If you want to live a long life, you’ve got to keep everything in balance.”

And she sighed. Her company was glad to see she was getting tired.

Granniana had given this subject a great deal of thought – and philosophical analysis too, as you can tell. If you had been one of these ladies in my mom’s sewing circle, you would be wise enough to make it your own philosophy.

I think with Granniana stooped forward and breathing her garlic-apple breath on you, your mind just wouldn’t be able to resist Granniana’s new philosophy. She was an old lady; and if you’ve ever noticed, old ladies don’t really notice if you don’t like them and that you’re tired of their talk and aren’t really interested.

“A friend of my grandchild’s poisoned herself on purpose, with insecticide, when she was only thirteen years old. Can you imagine? She tried to kill herself with insecticide. It wasn’t because she was doing what I was doing.

“With all these poisons in processed food and in those fizzy drinks, insecticide in small doses really isn’t even strong enough. One day it’ll be drinking water you drink to kill yourself!”

Cathy overrode the atmosphere with her monotonous voice, commenting, “My cousin killed herself with insecticide. She had been in her menopause – she didn’t know what she was doing. Her mother had done the same thing – her mother who was my mother’s sister. I think suicide is genetic.”

Lindsay added quickly, “Oh, but a bottle of insecticide in your garden shed can be tempting.” Her eyes were wide with truthfulness and you could tell she was speaking from her own experience. Maybe she was only trying to defend people who kill themselves with insecticide. She said, “You know, she might have thought it was the only way out, at the time.”

After a moment’s silence, Granniana concluded, “I’m glad I definitely don’t have suicide in my blood.” And she began to laugh, slapping both hands on her knees. “And even if I do have it in my blood, there’s too much insecticide now flowing in my veins to make the quantity of suicide effective at all!”

The ladies had become like giddy young girls, laughing at the mere word insecticide when someone mentioned it.

Granniana went to go get it from the kitchen, and they laughed some more. It was just out of control.

Chapter 5: Granniana Should Go to the Doctor

At first we were firm believers it was the insecticide. It had gotten to her entire digestive system, sort of like a parasite. Medically, even having insecticide in your desert or pudding is enough to start a cycle just like what malaria does to your system. And all it takes is a little bit of contamination. I knew it was the sausages though that gave Granniana her stomach ache every day though. Everyone else persistently believed it was the insecticide.

“So do stop putting insecticide in our tiramisu,” Claudia said one day. Claudia is my sister. I have seven sisters. She’s the third youngest. Claudia was a teenager and a single-mom and she was more into the new alternative path of staying out of drugs and smoking cigarettes and only getting drunk on weekends. Insecticide in your desert she said was unacceptable; she said it was almost as bad as binge drinking. She asked us if we actually knew how mad the insecticide had made us, over the years. It had made Granniana the craziest grandma on the planet, so she said.

I’ve never told anyone, outside the family, about the insecticide, and yet, it has been an issue in my family since as a long as I can remember.

“I think Granniana’s sick,” said Claudia one day. She had stayed up hours the night before vomiting, supposedly, after having eaten Granniana’s contaminated tiramisu, all of it. And with second helpings. She ate everything with second helpings because she had been sick and tired of not being able to eat dessert just because her grandmother had poisoned it again. She just wanted to eat her pudding.

Of course, there were days when Granniana made perfect dessert – tiramisu, mellow apple-crumbles, even delectable and various cheesecakes; juicy, multiple macaroons; even hand-made vanilla ice cream – without any poison in it.

At the breakfast table, Claudia tried to have us join her conviction for, what was to her, the obvious truth about Granniana (and we had only been stupid and blind about it, she said).

We had always thought that Granniana was mad and did all these strange eccentric things. But Claudia really was fed up with the insecticide, and she said bringing Granniana to the doctor – any kind of doctor. “It’s second to reporting her to the police, which of course we shouldn’t want to have to resort to – though that’s what she deserves.”

I had to stick up for our grandma there. “Do you think Granniana is ever going to go to a doctor?” I challenged Claudia. “She’s never been to a doctor. She’s against doctors. You know you won’t get her anywhere near a clinic or a hospital, not even to visit her dying friends.” This was Lucinda, my sister. Lucinda was always a good defender for her grandma, being the most naïve and child-like of us, I would say.

Lucinda knocked her bowl of milk and raisin bran by accident with her feet as she put them up on the table.

Mom said, “Do you really want Granniana to change? And about the insecticide – you know it works. It’s a miracle worker. When any of us have sore throats it works better than any candy or even better than a salt rinse. And it stops a cough.

“Your grandma Granniana isn’t crazy. You’ve got to be a little crazy to make people laugh sometimes. All Granniana wants is for us to be happy. She gives us all something to laugh about, doesn’t she? You children are so sulky and depressing a lot of the time. Teenagers. Where would I be without your grandmother and her sense of humour? Where would we be without this house, yes, even this kitchen table: Lucinda, get those feet off. And you too, Shirley – goodness sakes, all of you.

“You know your father could never have gotten us a house. Where is he now – a man who can’t get up till two in the afternoon. Well. If there’s anyone you children ought to be thankful to, it’s to your grandmother. You have all been born here, this is her house – and raised here – I couldn’t have raised you all on my own. And you’re still living here and eating your breakfast this very moment.

“The apples have paid Barney’s university all through those eleven years.” Then she muttered to me, “Barney, your education is more than you needed to have, eleven years.” To the rest, “How many grandmothers would do that? A lot of rich grannies are stinky misers.” Mom smiled.

Granniana was not a stinky miser like a lot of rich grannies, Mom was right. There was only one contradiction to be made: “Granniana’s a miser with presents,” piped Lucinda, and this was correct.

Lucinda was mopping the floor where she had spilled her breakfast under the table with a real big janitor’s mop. The air became soaked with Javex bleach and pine sol mixed together from the cleaning. Our pet rat Ozzie, under the table, scurried away from his special place under the table to his hole in the wall.

“Granniana’s a stinky miser when it comes to giving us presents,” repeated Lucinda.

I hated to have Granniana picked on. I felt it time to speak up. “Lucinda,” I said, in my big older brother tone of voice that I still get away with. “Just because you spilled and lost your breakfast doesn’t mean you have to poison and spoil a poor helpless rat’s breakfast. And take it easy on the Javex.”

I began whistling and whistling – the whistle that makes rats come to you, while watching Ozzie’s little hole in the wall. It wasn’t really a little hole, in fact. Ozzie was a well-fed rat and the size of a bunny rabbit. But, you know how you like to say “little” to things that are cute?

Ozzie came out again, with a piece of something pink between his rodent fingers which I recognised immediately as the frosting on my mother’s birthday cake, almost a year ago! Wow. It surprised me what sweets Ozzie stored in his flat for when he wouldn’t get enough food from us – a famine.

After Ozzie, I remembered Granniana. “You know, it’s really not fair of you to be teasing Grandma for being sick – in the head. It might not be true. She has to go to a doctor and he is the one who should know whether she is or really isn’t – and I’m sorry, but none of you, obviously, know anything about being sick in the head.”

A glance at my mother made me regret what had just come out of my mouth.

I quickly added, “You know, and then something can be done about it. If she is sick. To please Claudia. And . . . so we can eat safe and normal meals without ever having to taste first if it has insecticide in it or not. What do you think?"

Claudia was ready to answer. “Oh, yeah Mom. Maybe your doctor who told you you only had three months to live will tell Granniana she only has three days.”

“Dr. Getwell will find the answers,” concluded Mom with her shining and always tearfully expressive blue eyes. “Then it’ll be a chance for him to have a look at Granniana’s stomach aches as well. It could be a tumour, for all I know. But isn’t that funny, how could it be a tumour? How many years can a person have a tumour and not get weakened by it? – Granniana’s still as healthy as a two year old.”

My sister Janine put her fork in. “She’s had it – wasn’t it ever since Granniana drove down to Mexico in a bus and was having diarrhoea the whole time? I wasn’t even born yet.”

“But look,” rushed Mom quick, conscience-struck. “That was when she was seventy-one, and she’s eighty-six already. Of course, Shirley was just born then.” Mom smiled maternally. “Not you Janine, just all of you down to Shirley. That was fifteen years ago.”

“If it was cancer, she would have died a long time ago.”

That was Lucinda, making a contribution in defence this time for Granniana. “Mom, if she doesn’t want to go to the doctor, we can’t force her.” She looked around at us all, and we were all quiet. “I’m sure she’s not going to die anytime soon. Look at her. Jumpy as a kitten. I’m sure she’ll be fine. How would any one of you get her into the car to go to the doctor anyway?”

“Lucinda, you’re too young to be a part of our scheme.” Claudia always thought she knew everything better. A lot of the time she really did because she made a lot of thoughts in advance. “We’ll trick her into getting in the car. Easy. And she’ll just land in the clinic and be injected with a tranquilliser.”

Chapter 6: Granniana Goes to Dr. Will Getwell

All it really took was everybody going on strike and not taking one bite of the desert Granniana made the next day. There actually hadn’t been any insecticide in it. It had been such a waste. Granniana went and locked herself up in her room. She didn’t want to give in to going to the doctor and stayed in two days. She gave in because her sugar level had dropped so low – she had become really weak, not having eaten anything for two days. Even when she ate a meal, finally, she still wasn’t herself. She knew she wasn’t going to be left alone by her family until she gave in to going to the doctor.

And so, she agreed to go. It was going to be the first time in her life to go to a doctor.

As you know, at the doctor’s, if you are a patient, you are allowed one family member or relative to go with you to the diagnostics room. And if you haven’t got a family, then you’re allowed a friend who has known you eleven years or more. Right? That’s what the receptionist said to us.

I was not allowed to go with Granniana, even though I qualified double the requirements, having known her twenty-eight years at that time – not only eleven, and I was her grandson. Granniana hated doctors and also was afraid of them. This became very evident the way she went very pale and scarcely recognizable – just when she heard she was to go all alone to be diagnosed.

If there had been any other patients in the waiting room – which thank goodness there weren’t, they would have wondered if I had brought my granny to the clinic to be put to sleep or something.

I had to aid her from falling to the ground. Assisting her to stay up and walk, I felt how light she had become. She might not have been eating properly for days since she found out she was scheduled for the doctor’s. And she was spitting to the side – something which meant she was very nervous. She was still well enough to still be considerate of keeping my shirt-sleeve out of shot as she spat, but I was worried about the floor was going to have to be sterilized. We were at a clinic!

“Barney, don’t make me have to go there alone,” she said in a dieing voice.

“Granniana, you can’t show the doctor that you’re spitting. He’ll say it’s a disorder.”

Trying to be gentle, I dragged Granniana with me across the floor, back to the receptionist’s desk. I had had enough of doctors’ regulations. To top it off, the receptionist pretended she was busy and wouldn’t listen to me.

“She’s an old lady!” I protested. “Can’t you see? She’s an old lady, she can’t go anywhere alone.”

The pretty brunette had a very round, bubbly-person’s face and a direct, family-orientated approach to greeting people at the clinic, but it changed as she looked at us. “Sir. You may be a relative and I don’t doubt you are. It is only since recently, but elderly people are no longer allowed to go accompanied.”

This young lady’s indifferent, relentless gaze was not so easy to unlock out of. It was just: woah! Too much. Granniana, who was now sitting in the corner. I didn’t know how she had escaped there so quickly and by herself. She looked so unusually old, weak and extremely vulnerable. I was worried suddenly that going to the doctor was what actually would to kill her. She was breathing, still, steadily, though it sounded very shallow. I could see her wrinkly, rugged hands clasped together on her lap; her wrist-size ankles tucked in under her chair. She turned to look back at me. She was at that angle where she looked very much like Mother Teresa. She and Mother Teresa were look-alikes – I forgot to mention that earlier. Only, Granniana of course was the much older version and, sadly – it turned in my stomach and in my insecurity – the weaker.

I turned back to the receptionist, reluctant to have to look into her stare which I found very demanding of courage.

“Er, my grandmother is not going in unaccompanied.”

“I’m afraid those are the rules. Mr. Orchard,” the receptionist asserted in a way which made me blink and blink. She continued with that professional coldness that reminded me of people in Europe, “Dr. Getwell says that elderly people – at least, the very old and frail-looking ones – are not allowed any company. All other patients are permitted one family member or relation. And if none are available, due to death and so forth, one friend is permissible if they have known the patient eleven years – or more, of course.”

This was when I made the secretary an offer. “Listen,” I enticed. “I’ll give you my phone number. We’ll go out for a drink.”

I would do anything for my grandma.

After a pause, with a growing smile at me, the receptionist flapped out a fill-out form with a pen.

“Here’s a form you have to fill out for your granny, if you want to accompany her. Please answer the questions about your grandmother as best to your knowledge. Your home phone number and your work number go at the bottom, please.”

I looked at the paper, bewildered when I read a question down the list,

What would your member of family/relative/acquaintance choose to eat first on their plate at the start of a meal?

a) Potato fried in onion and olive oil

b) The stewed beef

c) The garnish on the side

d) The cauliflower

e) The peas

f) The broccoli

“Oh and here’s the form for your grandma – very important. Answer all the questions. Let’s do the first one together. When was the last time your grandma went to the doctor for a check up?”

“My grandma has never been to the doctor in her life.”

“Oh, just make up something or Dr. Getwell won’t see her. Just say, she’s a doctor herself. She checks herself regularly.”

“Okay.” I just wrote that down and went to the next question. They were all pretty personal questions I just didn’t know about my grandma and didn’t want to know. Some of them were rude. But Brenda the receptionist just told me what to write down. I guess I can say going to the doctor’s wasn’t something you could do without the help of contacts. Jeepers, it was as if I was in a third world country or something. Corrupt.

Granniana never went for check-ups, even with all the strange things happening in her life and with the strange things she was doing. Even without all those strange things she was doing, old people regularly should be going to the doctor and I’d say all of them do, right? All of Granniana’s relatives died of cancer, including her sister Frederica, called Fred, and they all had problems with cholesterol. It was too low – a strange abnormality – and no amount of mayonnaise and cream could treat it.

But the thing is, as my family had figured, “So long as Granniana isn’t climbing those trees and swinging through them, and so long as she doesn’t really need her wheelchair and doesn’t actually need those crutches either (but she still had her sharp mind for how to get handicapped benefits), Granniana was probably doing the right thing not going to a doctor.

Going to Dr. Getwell’s was basically all because of Claudia – to prove to her that there was nothing wrong with Granniana.

Inside the waiting room, by the reception, you could see Dr. Getwell was an all-around doctor, for all kinds of medical problems and abnormalities. He had photos of some of his patients: before and after on the walls, some smiling, some not so well yet and not smiling. Your attention got sucked into these photos the moment you saw them. But quite a few of them were even worse than those photos they show of how animals look having undergone animal testing. I wondered if this was only the adult waiting room, and children were allowed to sit in here only if they were blindfolded.

There was one wall that provided you with relief, where you could fix your visual attention – with self discipline. It was an intricate, colourful mosaic of Dr. Getwell’s doctor’s certificates. In the very centre: General Practitioner. The central certificate was accrediting him as a General Practitioner. It was in green. And all around, the other certificates were in lots of different colours. Just to name a few, whether it interests you or not, there was a purple certificate in gynaecology, a red one in orthopaedics, a sort of mustard coloured one in oncology, and the rest I didn’t really take note of because of some constant furtive gazes that kept coming to me from the reception desk.

To tell you the truth, I only have been to gynaecologist clinics. The earliest memory I have was when I was four years old, accompanying my mother for her maternity check-ups. Those doctors for maternity never had as many certificates and degrees as this doctor though. I’ll bet – if you would get a directory of all the doctors in your city or town, you wouldn’t find a single one with as many degrees as Dr. Getwell!

The ultimate determining factor for why Dr. Getwell was just what we were looking for, despite whatever doctorates this doctor had, was his psychotherapy one.

Chapter 7: Granniana’s Diagnosis

It was me who had to explain the certain reasons why Granniana ate expired sausages and drank insecticide. And when Dr. Getwell heard it, this is what he did. He laughed. I suppose this was his escape from the awkwardness of it and how he had never heard of it before in his life. I don’t know if many people do it – drink insecticide – as part of their diet . . . not for the same reason as Granniana does – which is actually a pretty logical one if you think about it. Maybe it’s just me who thinks so because I’ve grown up with it. I never had to tell a doctor before though, and I didn’t know how Dr. Getwell was going to react. Well, he did believe me. I was glad. He did not judge me. He did not call the police.

After he laughed, all he said was, “An old tree doesn’t get replanted easily” – in his broad sort of 1950’s television accent. And then: “If all you’ve come here for today is a doctor’s recommendation, you’ve got it! You don’t really need to hear it, do you? Ha ha!” He leaned over, his hands on his knees. “Stop your toxin-tolerance diet! I’ll write it down for you. You might soon notice a remarkable difference in the health of her stomach, Mr. Orchard. I suggest you simply confiscate that rotten food from her if she doesn’t quit on her own.” After all, everything Dr. Getwell had been saying he had been saying to me; not to Granniana. Good thing I had come or Granniana would not have known anything the doctor would have wanted to say.

I was pleased that he fulfilled everyone’s expectation of a well-renowned doctor.

“You see?” I said to Granniana. She just smiled.

Dr. Getwell, even though he laughed about the insecticide and the sausages, was a very serious kind of doctor. The classic type – you know, dressed in a white butcher’s suit. He had a one-coloured, angular face – as that of all intellectuals, a chin curving up at you, announcing that he knew what was right. A kind of pale indecisive mouth – in a straight line immediately after he finished speaking or when he stopped giving you a smile you so needed for assurance. His eyes were sharp and watchful of your every movement; he showed he was making note of everything about you and knew what everything meant. I now knew what my mom meant when she said it was as if these eyes had an x-ray at the back of them to detect what your disease might be.

Dr. Getwell had saved the life of my mother before and had been the only doctor who had diagnosed her for the disease that she had, after eight doctors. All the doctors, before Dr. Getwell, told my mother there was nothing wrong with her, that it was all in her mind and even her symptoms were merely psychological. But Dr. Getwell knew my mother was not just causing her own illness.

She had always been in constant baffled admiration for this doctor. There was something unnatural that he had, I could see that myself, personally. Of course there’s no such thing as a disease-scan x-ray, not even in hospitals, or there would be no need for doctors, not really. Dr. Getwell wouldn’t need one, he had one naturally. It was the content inside his skull.

The medical-mental whatever examination began with questions. “Madame. Is there anything you eat which you think might give you those painful stomach cramps on a regular basis? – excuse me for asking you.” Turning aside back to me, he explained, “Even though your grandmother might be too old to answer my questions, Mr. Orchard, I think it is only respectful for us to give it a try. See if she can answer. Do you mind? I know you only came to accompany her because you think she cannot speak for herself.

“You can hopefully understand and agree with the board of medics, Mr. Orchard, for disagreeing with elderly patients usual request of a close relative or friend to accompany them for their examination. At the beginning of this medical year, the board of medics resolved to obliterate the old practice of allowing of one family member or friend to accompany an elderly patient.”

I didn’t agree. I disagreed. But Dr. Getwell was so eloquent and doctorly about what he was trying to convince me with, I didn’t want to sound I knew better than him.

Granniana became angry though. She sparked back to her old self – forget the two days locked in her room without food and all the worry it cost her to come here. “You know what? I don’t have Alzheimer’s!” Dr. Getwell raised a sceptic eyebrow. The nerve of him! “You know, doctor, I used to think it was the sausages. But it could also be the apples, doctor. Do you eat apples? I’ll send you a basket – once I’m home again. Once I’m home again. I hope you won’t mind – on my farm, I spray them with insecticide. It’s not an organic farm. ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away!’ You’re a doctor. The kind of medicines you give your patients is far worse for you in side-effects than a little insecticide. So it shouldn’t matter that my apples are not organic.

“I know, if nobody needed to go to the doctor because they ate an apple a day, then you wouldn’t have any business and would have to shut down your clinic.”

I winced – oh, what was Granniana saying?! She was a patient. She could talk this way whenever she liked behind the doctor’s back but not right in front of him in his clinic.

“Dr. Getwell, you’re not a helper of mankind. You work for the pharmaceutical industry. All you folks want is money! Money money money! You own no disease-scan x-rays inside your brain like my silly daughter-in-law says and you’re no magic healer. You don’t have the Holy Spirit either, I can tell you that from going to a church where people did have it had healed all sorts of diseases just by the laying on of hands. No no, you don’t even remember everything you learned at university – or do you? Also, sometimes you make a false diagnosis don’t you? – it doesn’t matter so much, does it? My favourite aunt was killed that way. Doctors always do the wrong thing. It’s always been that way. You doctor’s are no different from how you always were. Cutting my grandparents’ arms; all those tortures you performed when your patients would have lived much longer and without pain had you not taken your tools out. You doctors are useless, you should be cutting up people’s fish for supper, you’d at least leave us poor fellow humans alone and save us the dirty work – of preparing fish. I hate the touch of raw fish – and the smell.”

I began to wonder suddenly when Dr. Getwell sunk deep in his chair and propped his feet up on a footstool, smiling.

Granniana was not a person who paid attention to professionalism. She judged by character. She was making a scrutiny of Dr. Getwell now. And she began to change tune. What a relief that was to see, believe you me. She didn’t complain about how the doctor made himself so informally comfortable though I thought she was going to make a remark about it. After all, she always liked to see that people were well-accommodated. “It looks though you’re quite a handsome-looking man in white. You remind me of what an ancestor of mine looked like – I have a painting of him. You’re not like the other doctors after all. You’re different than all the other doctors, I can tell.”

Dr. Getwell laughed a bit, which surprised me, and then he returned to his grave, serious condition as before. “No, I am not offended by your speeches, Madame. And you can keep the basket of apples you wanted to send to me once you’re back home. Keep them for your one a day.

“Did you know, Mrs. Orchard, that the healthiest-seeming person: the most glorious athlete soaring high in the air on one of his jumps, and the friendliest, happiest old woman hobbling about: all have at least one health problem or another? People are just ignorant about them. They have not been educated seven odd years to undo their ignorance. But Mrs. Orchard, I am a doctor. I’ve been educated and know what they are.

“Whatever your opinion is of doctors, you are right. I am not the stereotype. I do not profit from my patients’ diseases and malfunctions. The problems of patients I see who come to me wrench my heart.

“You are paying a fortune to me today,” the doctor continued. “As you may take care to notice, every time I write something down on this block of paper it is towards your invoice. Not mine.” He looked back hard and professional at my grandma who was just a bit too docile for him.

Wow. I wondered if he spoke this way to all his clients – I mean patients. His conclusion was: “I have thirty-seven other clients coming to see me after you, Mrs. Orchard.”

After the momentum, he tilted his head a bit, looking at Granniana. He saw in her face the results he had wanted. I guess it was respect. So he picked up his former helpfulness again. “What I can tell you, Mrs. Orchard, is I am going to have to give you a referral to a physio. Have you ever been to a physiotherapist?”

Aha! So this was the one certificate he did not have, a physiotherapist’s.

“A physio,” Granniana repeated. She was with fullest respect and most entire dumbfounded respect for her doctor. She didn’t know the answer and stared back at him in delirium. It is only to be expected that my grandmother could not say anything again after this. Maybe this was Dr. Getwell’s strategy for making someone a frequent, permanent patient even though they had only dropped by for a check-up.

“Your back, Mrs. Orchard.” His eyebrows were straight as lines but he now lifted them, in arches. He began to shout, “Can you straighten your back out, for me?” It was entirely unnecessary. He didn’t need to shout at Granniana as if it was not obvious she was wearing her hearing aids today. (They were even sticking out a little.)

Granniana couldn’t straighten her back, though she tried.

“That’s not good enough,” came Dr. Getwell’s approval for the misfortune. “Your back isn’t quite the normal, Mrs. Orchard.

“Now I can tell you the benefits of a back-brace and why I strongly recommend you to see my referred physiotherapist as soon as we can book you an appointment. What a physiotherapist can do is construct a back brace to fit just your back,” he said. “Have you ever worn braces? I mean, the natural braces you see teenagers wear on their teeth.”

Still stunned – but still in her right mind, Granniana responded with a no. Then she scratched her head. “Braces. . .” (Her voice came with a croak.) “Barney. Grandson. Didn’t you wear those funny miniature razors along your teeth once, boy? You called them braces and I just laughed about it – oh, those were the days. I used to think you needed to get them because you already had a paradontal disease that made your teeth fall out! So you needed braces to brace them. You were far too young to have a paradontal disease, I thought. They were terrible, those braces, they cut up your mouth inside, didn’t they? The inside of your cheeks? What were they for again, those braces?”

I tried to answer, but the doctor did instead.

“Those kinds of braces were to straighten your grandson’s teeth. Now, you are going to get the same thing except it’s not for your teeth, it’s for your back.”

Granniana gave a start, and it became evident in her face howshe made a grotesque image in her mind of this.

“Braces for your posture are – “encased Dr. Getwell – “to straighten your posture. They may cut into your back, as well.

“Mrs. Orchard and Barney. I have done research from observation in my lifetime. Unlike many doctors, I relate poor posture to all kinds of ailments, of mind, body, and spirit.” (Talking with his hands as he explained). “Vice versa, any kind of sickness or malfunction distorts a person’s posture. Are you following me?

“Mrs. Orchard, in a nutshell, I strongly recommend you see my referred physiotherapist. I can strongly see, with just my naked eyes, that all you need is a back brace.”

“Dr. Getwell!” I protested. “She’s eighty-six years old! I don’t think a brace will do anything to her bones but break them! She has osteoporosis. And you just said it will cut into her back!”

Dr. Getwell ruffled his medley of silver and brown-coloured hair with unruffled self-satisfaction. “Believe me, Mr. Orchard. She will notice a remarkable difference and even become a better person. I leave the opportunity entirely up to you, however, to take or to decline.”

Then some wheels began to turn, and I realized something. “A better person? A better person altogether? You mean she’ll have . . . her mental state fixed as well? Just by having braces?”

Granniana caught me suddenly in a dark tunnel glare.

It was feisty, self-assertive-in-your-eye and invading-all-your-comfort-zone-and-personal-space old lady again. She switched from leaning into my face to leaning into the doctor’s facial periphery.

“Nobody’s going to change my mental state!” She switched over from leaning into the doctor’s face to leaning into my face. Then back again. “Nobody. Nobody’s going to change my mental state!”

Granniana was and always had been a stubborn girl. I could just envision her starting up, any moment, and jumping out of the window like she did before at the dentist’s. That was when the dentist had told her all she needed was dentures. All her regular teeth that were still there needed to be pulled out one by one, he said. That was why Granniana just started up and jumped out the window. Luckily, it had been from the third floor and Granniana had landed in the back seat of an open convertible car. It had been driving, too. What providence how it happened – she did not land just slightly to the side of the car or hit the driver or anything like that.

What the driver of the car did was keep a cool head and drive on. He asked her where she wanted to go, and she answered: the hairdresser, and told him the details. And he dropped her off there. At the end of the day, Granniana came home to us with a perm, from the hairdresser, all standing up. She said to us, “I won’t be needing no dentures. And I won’t be needin’ no dentist, and I won’t be needin’ no doctor. That’s the end of it, or I’ll just make an end of my life.” We all respected that, of course. The dentist did too. He let us off the hook and paid for the broken window himself. I told Dr. Getwell about this.

Dr. Getwell was amazed when he found out that Granniana had never had an operation in her life, and had never taken medicine. “So you’ve even jumped out of the window and didn’t need any medical assistance. You could do it without medical assistance? You’ve never even take painkillers?!” He wheeled around in his study seat and opened a cabinet. He took out something and held it up for us to see. It was pretty much just like an asthma puffer. It probably was just what it looked like and wasn’t anything else. But why an asthma puffer? Granniana had never complained of asthma or anything like that. Had she ever given the doctor that impression?

Dr. Getwell had never even listened to my grandma’s breathing with a stethoscope. Asthma is a terrible condition to have.

“It sounds, Mrs. Orchard, like you know just the secret to a happy healthy life which doctor’s certainly have known about for hundreds of years but don’t use in their practice.” This gave me something to hope about – a secret miracle drug. Dr. Getwell continued. “It’s because it isn’t pharmaceutical and it shouldn’t have to cost money.

What was it?

“It’s laughter. Laughter makes everyone feel better. The fact of life,” – with a pause of empathy – “is some people go to their graves or urns with their sicknesses and it’s never found out what it was that killed them until their autopsy. Or, they never find out at all.” He saw the look of slight distress on what must have been both my face and Granniana’s. Dr. Getwell smiled a little, and I was glad he smiled.

“Now, I’m not saying these stomach pains you have, Mrs. Orchard, are going to harass you the rest of your life.” Pfewf. “And you might find out the cause, one day. Maybe you will get well soon, or get well later. Who knows?” Dr. Getwell shrugged. “But I insist you take my advice for now. Don’t worry about what has been causing your illnesses and what to do,” said Dr. Getwell. “My advice is to just laugh it off.”

At first, we believed there was more to listen for. Granniana and I watched carefully and waited. But this was all his advice – besides the back brace.

I started to believe there really was no doubt about it. The doctor was getting rude now. Wasn’t it rudeness? He was ordering us to just laugh it off.

Well, maybe what Dr. Getwell meant was there really was nothing wrong with Granniana, mentally, and there was nothing wrong with getting stomach aches from eating four-years-expired sausages either. That would happen to anybody. What I was not ready to accept from him, however, was the completely unprofessional advice he was giving. To “just laugh it off”, he said. That was no medicine. Laughing off an illness just wouldn’t work, at least not when it was something serious. The doctor was not being serious. Maybe he was drunk. His cheeks had been blushing, I could see, and they had not been when we first came in.

“See this?” Now he was about to explain what he had been indicating the asthma puffer at us for. He gave it a shake. You could hear it was a dry sort of spray and not something like hairspray with liquid inside it.

“The substance contained in here is called systemata humoris. In proper English: systematic humour. Systematic Humour . . . And it’s in spray form.

“This, my dear patient and company, you might identify for yourselves, as the well-familiar, common, asthma puffer. It is merely the container which you see. You can well put anything you like into one of these handy, versatile contraptions.” He cleared his throat. “Systematic Humour – or, systemata humoris, in medical terms, is an herbal ingredient. You can find out about it on the internet – we’re running out of time. Mrs. Orchards, have you access to a computer at home?”

“Dr. Getwell, oh a computer? . . . I don’t have a computer anymore; I’ve heard and read that they aren’t the latest technology anymore. But my grandson Barney has one. In fact, he made a website a few years ago, if I remember correctly, advertising our apple farm. The address, it’s www.apple-gran.ca.”

Dr. Getwell made no response to this. He was not interested. However, I was glad he continued telling us about the puffer: “You might not understand instructions very well. The instructions in the package are straightforward – but . . . to limit chances of you making mistakes, allow me to quickly . . .” he smiled – “give doctor’s instructions.” He began. “See here? Just a light spray – press here. There you go, it’s yours. I have plenty of stock still in storage.” He gave the puffer to me, not to Granniana, I suppose, out of precaution. “You won’t find this over the counter, it’s homeopathic,” the doctor said. “If you’ve always wished you had a puffer like other people do, well, you’ve got one now. Doctor’s prescription. See how it works and you’re scheduled to come in again in a week’s time. We need to keep you monitored for a while, in case this is not the right medication for you.”

Not really knowing what to do, I tried to put the asthma puffer in Granniana’s hand but she did not want to take it. “I haven’t – haven’t got – as-ma,” she stammered.

“It’s your medication,” I said on behalf of Dr. Getwell. “It doesn’t matter if you really have asthma or not.”

I don’t think Granniana could believe that she was getting away with the crazy things she had originally come to the doctor because of. But she was diagnosed with asthma. Her eyes were just blitzing wide in amazement. This was when Granniana really was no different at all from other old ladies. No matter the tree climbing and swinging on the branches and poisoning her family to make them immune to modern day toxins. Granniana was just like anyone at the doctor’s when they could scarcely believe their diagnosis wasn’t half as bad as they had feared.

Chapter 8: Granniana’s Results

It turned out that Granniana had been diagnosed by the doctor with ‘sense of humour deficiency’. It was written out so and stored in her file. Psychologically, there was nothing wrong. But the diagnosis, in proper medical terms, was Hypo-comica. My grandmother suffered from hypo-comica. There was no other name for it. I didn’t think that was too serious of a disease to have. Is it really a disease? I mean, I think I get something like that once in a while. How about the average person? Medically, though, there must be a certain point where a lack of sense of humour just isn’t within the range of normality anymore and that makes it a disease. That makes sense.

Later, I found out on the internet, there is in fact a blood count you can have made, testing in your blood for how many cells of sense of humour you have. My major at university was micro-biology. When I discovered, on the internet, that there had been a breakthrough in analysis for what caused a human’s sense of humour, I keenly read through every article I could find on it. Research has discovered that sense of humour actually consists of cells, flowing in your blood, and therefore can be counted. I phoned up Dr. Getwell and asked him why he did not have Granniana go have a blood-test for this. Dr. Getwell’s reply was, “Yes, it is a newest discovery, however it is costly in excess.” If Granniana should demand a count of her sense of humour cells, she could come for another appointment. However, Dr. Getwell recommended us not to throw away $760 merely to test something that was simple and reliable to test using just clinical observation the usual way. Dr. Getwell reminded me he was a psychotherapist, and every patient that walked into his clinic was tested for sense of humour deficiency. The patient was not meant to notice. The laboratories that did the cell count in your blood only just wanted your money. They were not approved by the International Medical Association.

Dr. Getwell also explained this to my Mom, on the phone, and that made her marvel about Dr. Getwell all over again.

We showed Granniana’s results on paper to the family, Claudia in particular. None of them knew there was a more reliable way to test for sense of humour except the traditional method anyway.

“Aren’t you glad this is all she has?” smiled Mom.

Claudia was all dark and glowering about the foulness she judged the whole thing with. “She doesn’t have asthma!” Claudia contradicted, pointing at the pale blue, shiny puffer as if it were a mutant dog standing in our kitchen. The puffer stood, blameless. “And Granniana’s crazy. She has a sense-of-humour that’s all her own, alright. Look at her, look at her smile when we can’t eat her poisoned dessert. She smiles and laughs enough, every time. We even laugh about it too. Granniana has a sense of humour, alright. And it’s not normal. The doctor couldn’t recognize it. It’s warped. It’s a sense of humour which I can’t understand, let alone can a doctor.

“It’s all ethically, morally wrong. Mom, Barney, look at it from our point of view, please. Let’s be selfish, for once. We’re suffering. It’s not fair what she does to people. Just because she’s an old lady doesn’t mean she should be doing what she’s doing. Insecticide. Have you any idea how toxic insecticide is? Other people have killed themselves drinking it. If we were to really be selfish, for once, and be healthy, normal – we would ask Granniana to move out of the house. She’s going to have to start living in a nursing home.

“Oh, I know what you’re going to say, Mom. ‘If it weren’t for Granniana, none of you children would be around. We’d still be cupids flying around in Heaven waiting for a place on earth to be born into, I know.”

Claudia was blonde and blue-eyed and the pragmatic type, very logical. She was studying Logistics at university. I know it has to do with packaging parcels and the whole lot, but you need a lot of logic for it. Claudia’s main hobby at the time was paragliding and when you watched her landing or setting out with her equipment, it was evident she had no fear or anxiety and no excitement and no joy about it either. Even though she was flying, or about to fly, or had just flown. She was the most clear-headed person in the family and probably the most clear-headed person I knew, I think. You could count on her to see things as they really were, and envision how things were supposed to be.

“She can’t do whatever she likes,” Claudia scorned. “Come on, Granniana’s too old to own a whole farm. I mean, when she’s gone, and she will be sooner or later, we won’t be the weirdoes of the world anymore, having an old grandma who just appears in a tree along the country road, waving at you. We’ve had enough journalists and magazine- and-TV morons coming for interviews. I’m not showing my face as part of this ludicrous family for one of their photos one more time. If only there were some real wildlife around here and not just Granniana – ”

“Claudia,” interrupted Mother. “Your language. Watch your language. I know you’re about to say a bad word.”

“I’m not saying any bad words!” Claudia gradually had been disclosing a bit of temper, hadn’t she, which she really had just at the core of that solid, solid ice-box coolness of hers. Sometimes it just leaked.

“I can say a lot worse about her. I can say that she still has perfect control of her bladder but she just lets it go when she’s swinging in the trees because she’s lazy.” Claudia, when she was mad, turned yellow. Her complexion usually was a very fine, normal one with pink cheeks – but when she did get excited, which was rare, she turned yellow. Looking like apple-juice. It wasn’t normal, of course, but she was just like Granniana in one respect: she never went to the doctor and you couldn’t get her to go to one.

“So, let’s see this treatment of hers.” Claudia picked up Granniana’s Systematic Humour spray from the kitchen counter and turned it over in her hand, reading the label. “An asthma puffer. What’s that supposed to do? Suffocate her? Most likely, since she doesn’t have asthma.”

Granniana actually had been in the room the whole time . . . sitting quietly in the far corner by the veranda doors, knitting. Knitting for the winter, for Claudia’s little daughter. Claudia’s daughter was Granniana’s only grandchild. Granniana was a little deaf, after all. She did not look like she had understood anything Claudia had said. But towards the end, Claudia’s voice had elevated to such a high ranking pitch that Granniana was forced to turn her head up from her knitting and listen. She responded with such a sharp groan, it became a witch’s shriek out of a sudden.

She began a mournful deplore. “I don’t want asthma. And I don’t want any kind of sickness. Not having enough sense of humour is no sickness!” It looked as if she was going to throw her knitting off her lap the way she was flapping it in her frustration towards Claudia. Mom came to her side to put it down, gently.

Granniana did not notice her. “I wish that idiotic puffer Dr. Getwell gave me will suffocate me to death so I’ll be gone and in a better place and be far away from all of you,” she announced.

I knew what was going to come next: Mother.

“Oh, don’t talk that way, Granniana,” Mother implored. She was, in fact, Granniana’s daughter-in-law. She was the very caring kind, with curly blond hair, very pink cheeks, of Irish descent; she had the kind of eyes that looked like they had tears in them all the time. In case you couldn’t tell by now, she was the one who had taught me good values and decent manners. She was so caring that she was worrying. She seemed to feel that so long as she was present, nobody should be feeling bad. We were all little pet geranium plants, to her, in little pots. She did not joke around much – if ever she did, her joke was meant as a binding agent for harmony and when she laughed it was because she was so happy that everybody had found harmony by finding something funny together. Her voice was high and naïve and a little high-strung.

“You know how your son Abel would have had you in a home for the aged if it hadn’t been for the votes we’ve been having every year. It’s only your son and Claudia who don’t want you here with us.” Mom always equated death with senior citizen homes. If ever you’d mention death, she always cut across with talking of senior care homes instead. I suppose she just couldn’t face death. She did not know how to deal with the issue and that anyone was going to die eventually. Some people are like that. Mother always got away with being naïve and innocent, no matter if she really was or was not truthfully naïve and innocent or just pretending. Some people are like that.

“Well, you know what, Rosie,” came Granniana’s pensive, tuneful response. She was calm and looking out the window, seeing visions before her in the distance. Her voice was very dark but with a rosy ring of hope. “I’ve figured, when I can’t climb apple trees anymore, there’s nothing I’ve got left of life,” she said. “When that happens, take me to the nursing home. I’ll die there.”

“Oh Granniana!” exclaimed Mother.

I rolled my eyes. All this drama on a sunny day like this. Mother herself was going to have to go to the nursing home one day herself. So was I. That’s just a fact of life. It’s part of life.

Why did I have to listen to this? I had just been about to go check if the raspberries were ripe for picking yet, and I had a new hat with me for the scarecrow in the lettuce patch. I used to always envision my grandmother was going to die here, with us. I didn’t ever want her to die anywhere else.

Mother of course was always thorough in her efforts to make things right. “I’m going to visit you every week,” she said. “Every Sunday, with all your grandchildren. And you won’t have to be like any of the other poor old folks in there who have nobody visiting them. And you know we’ll always be thinking of you, right here.”

“Once a week, that’s not enough,” Granniana returned, sharply, and a little more back to normal. “Well, when I’m dead, all you’ll do is light a candle at night and you won’t need to do any visiting. I’ll be here again. Even though Heaven is a nice place and I deserve it – more than most people I know – life goes on over there for the dead just the same as it does over here for the living. And I don’t want to forget you folks while I’m there. Might not recognise any one of you when you get there yourselves.” She gave us a warm, grandmotherly gaze over all her brood, with a chuckle. I felt it assuring, no matter what was going to happen with Granniana in the future.

Granniana had all sorts of different sides to her. This morning you got her futuristic, realistic and planning-for-her-future side, which she did not show very often. “When I am nothing but a spirit and my skin and bones have been stuffed away inside a coffin to hide their disintegration, I will make an apparition here at this house for you and have a look at every one of you, regularly, as the years go by,” she expressed with pathos, and really meant it. “Aaand your offspring,” she added in a different tone, giving an expectant and edge-on-derisive look at me (I don’t think Granniana thought I was ever going to contribute offspring for the Orchard heritage. I was the only boy in the family. If I should omit the reproductive part of my life, the Orchard name would die out).

I just finished eating the pickles and ice cream I had been eating that morning. Pickles and ice cream, of course separately. I put the jar back into the fridge and the container back in the freezer on top.

To this, Granniana sharp remark startled suddenly. “What are you, pregnant, Barney?”

This made me burst out laughing, being a man!

“What are you eating pickles and ice cream for, and in the morning?”

“Well.” I recovered from my healthy laughter. “I was feeling a bit queasy this morning. I thought to myself, pregnant women get queasy in the morning – I remember Mom, and Claudia. But they eat a lot, and they eat pickles and ice cream together, don’t they, and it makes them feel better.” Of course I was joking. Truth is I had had some kind of strange binge-eating craving for taste-contrasts, since yesterday.

I looked around and Mother was laughing but Granniana hadn’t laughed one bit. Claudia, even, was smiling – a smirk. I recognized that there was in deed a sharp contract between my mother’s sense of humour and with Granniana’s. Even Claudia had a sense of humour. It was just Granniana who couldn’t laugh.

That’s when it dawned on me. Where had I been? These past few months, Granniana had never been laughing at my jokes. She didn’t find other peoples’ jokes funny either. Now I knew that whoever was being funny just should not take it personally when Granniana could not laugh. She had hypo-comica.

“Oh, time for me to enjoy myself, today.” This was Granniana speaking. She had been sitting next to the glass doors to the garden after all and it was a sunny day. She stood up with a groaning look on her face, and she creaked, audibly, as she moved.

Chapter 9: Granniana’s Medication

Later that afternoon, some gourmet apple connoisseurs that came by to pick up some ordered apples related to us their urgent concern about an old woman up in a tree by the front gate on the road. They said, she was sitting on a branch and at first they had thought it was a statue-hoax they were seeing – you know, maybe a funny welcome to visitors to the apple farm. In case you have never driven through the countryside in Western Canada, woah, there are the weirdest presentations some farms and estates show.

“But she was really alive,” said one of the ladies, faintly and not expecting us to believe her. “She was moving and even looked at us. An old woman. She held a pale blue asthma puffer with her and she was inhaling it. And it – it – was making her laugh.”

The really odd thing was that this lady telling us this, in fact, had the same kind of pale-blue colour of eyes as the pale blue of Granniana’s puffer. And yet she was talking about it.

Mother and I looked at each other and were good at making monotonous faces at each other. We showed what we could pull off to our visitors. Mother had done a lot of drama when she was younger.

A round gentleman with a balding head and grey suit added nervously – and he was French – “Pardon. . . I, eu, shoulde have hade – the nerfe – to aske her, this olde femme – whate she was doing. But, eu, you know, it was a rather - eu, absurde sight – “

I nodded, encouraging his ‘nerf’ to speak English –

“– so, eu, we just continuede driving.”

“Yes, yes,” I affirmed. “You did the right thing” (remembering how last time a regional farm inspector had been peed on and had come to our house drenched and stenched! He had made the mistake of standing under the tree, telling Granniana to come down. Do you know what I had to give to him for compensation? My second best suit. For keeps, and with compliments from Apple Orchard Farm. I did not want to have to give away another suit after that. Granniana’s pee was as the French would say tres chere, indirectly, if it meant one of my suits.

“Who was that . . . old old – strangely old person?” asked this other round man in a suit with eyes that looked like they were winking at you the whole time and with a Yorkshire terrier’s moustache. “It’s only for your own safety that you insure us you go there and see her yourself.”

“Rather . . . what is it?” said the first bald-headed man, with a misbehaving smile. I thought him rude, though of course he thought he was just being a funny and really clever guy – just on another wave length to mine. He was French but not really entirely like the French in movies. He did not seem romantic at all.

I tried my best to answer with European gentility, “Yes, you are absolutely correct to ask. What that is you saw – was – in fact: the owner of this place, the owner of this very apple farm you nice folks are visiting. You were right, she’s alive . . . she’s not a statue.” Hands in my pockets. “She’s my grandma. She ruins – uh, runs this farm.”

I heard for the first time how ‘runs’ can easily sound like ‘ruins’. I rather loved to see the look in those wine-drinking faces; watched their eyes gradually ignite, sparks of drollery flying from the man whose eyes were always winking. The others were really outgoing people themselves. There was lots going out of them.

We all laughed together. My laugh was the loudest – after the laugh of that asthma-puffer-colour-eyed lady who had been so faint of voice and before.

“Ah, in fact,” I quipped. “Those apples you’ve stored by the boxes in your vehicles were very likely all picked by her yourselves – I mean herself.”

“Zut allor,” said the exactly puffer-blue eyed lady, even though she wasn’t French. “She never comes down from those apple trees? Not even when she’s picked enough apples and done her work and she can’t say hello to visitors driving by.” Suddenly, “Why is she still working?”

I shrugged. “She’s not a beggar woman. She doesn’t want to go out begging. Has to make a living somehow with the rate the government gives for pensions which is very low. She’s still got an entire family to feed.

”Oh? She’s still got children?

“Oh, but sitting on a tree at the entrance there, it’s her trick of attracting clients for the farm, isn’t it?”

“No,” I replied honestly. “You’re welcome to see it that way, however.”

“She’s just an old lady,” chimed the first round bald man. “She’s a bit of a mutant – a genetic mutant of the species, but ah – “

“What species?” asked the naïve blue-eyed lady. “Oh you mean the species of old ladies? Oh, that’s too funny!” She slapped her knee. “That’s a good one, Joe!”

I meant to bring all this pretty indecent banter to a close now. The strategy I was thinking of was to round up those business-suited apple connoisseurs as if I were a sheep-dog, press them forward a little towards the exit door. Smiling, cultured, I diverted the criticism they had been making of Granniana to the way I saw her. “She’s something special, isn’t she?” I suggested warmly. “And something you don’t see everyday, obviously.” Maybe I wasn’t smiling so much anymore.

But mother, mild and bright-minded, just kept smiling and laughing, more and more. “And that puffer, you see,” she managed to articulate, “is supposed to make her laugh.”

The apple connoisseurs chuckled, mainly because they were bewildered, I think, and didn’t know what to do with their helpless amusement.

“What is it, laughing gas?” roared the second round man with the Yorkshire terrier whiskers. He bellowed over, being rolled by the weight of his wine-barrel belly; his hands flapped repeatedly and I realized the poor man was meaning to slap them over his knees but couldn’t reach them.

Everybody beside him was expanding in dimension the same way he was, their faces turning red. I could see that the man with the moustache had high blood pressure due to clogged arteries. Many of the vessels in his face were blue, and it looked like his blood had nowhere to go and was turning a deeper blue, even violet, and sprouting. That’s the kind of skin he had. Dangerous for him. It was an ordeal to look at. So I looked away.

Once I could answer the educated guess the gentleman had made, I did. “It’s systemata humoris. An herb. It’s natural. From the doctor. She’s prescribed on it, my grandmother. Unlike laughing gas it has no side effects. Laughing gas – the chemical one, makes you go crazy.”

“Our Granniana has hypo-comicalism,” Mother augmented, for their medical knowledge. “That’s a clinical condition. It’s: not having enough sense of humour.” She conducted out the words like they were an orchestra.

Looking around, there evidently was nothing wrong with anyone’s sense of humour here. Theirs was in well function. I suppose they had never heard of hypo-comicalism before. Neither had I until we went to Dr. Getwell’s. And they weren’t taking it seriously. What can I say? I couldn’t help letting go and blurting out racing on my own laughter tread wheels too. Later, I realised this was a symptom showing I was not at risk of becoming a hypo-comic!

Granniana’s medication in the pale blue asthma puffer made her laugh. She had read the directions to us, when she first started taking it: “Listen to this.” She had said. “Light spray, 11 to 17 times daily, or as directed by physician. May cause mild but frequent stomach-ache. For therapeutic use only.”

I didn’t need a puffer to make me laugh.

Summary and Conclusion

Of course, Granniana did not have anything wrong with her. It happens to everyone, doesn’t it, that they can’t laugh when they really are supposed to. You just might not be normal top notch at the time. Whatever your cell count is in your blood stream of sense of humour, it can fluctuate, so it can be perfectly fine if there isn’t anything that can make you laugh.

Granniana didn’t need a puffer to make her laugh.

“It didn’t do me any harm, though, it was herbal. I wouldn’t have taken anything for my hypo-comicalism if it weren’t herbal. I don’t believe in the pharmaceutical industry,” she said. “It’s all chemicals.” Of course, Granniana continued eating McDonald’s chocolate-chip cookies even while she was ill with hypo-comicalism. She had been recommended to sleep sitting instead of lying – that had been number two on the sheet list of what to do when you get hypo-comicalism after your forties.

“Do you know what’s the best medicine?” Granniana said to me, one afternoon. She was sitting on the veranda shelling peas. Claudia was there too, sitting on a footstool . . . her two-year-old daughter, as usual, strapped to her drawing desk (chair and desk connected) at Claudia’s side – strapped so that the little one would stay drawing all day and not go climbing about and look too much like her great-grandma. Claudia was a single mom and had enough to deal with every day).

“The best medicine for everything, yes?” I returned, smiling at Granniana to show the poor old woman I was listening.

An answer came from somebody I haven’t introduced you to yet. It was Claudia’s two-year-old daughter – we called her Sunshine. She could talk pretty well for her age. She was always around us; she could even hold up her pictures she scribbled with her crayons in response to what we were talking about. It’s amazing, she could relate to everything emotionally, psychologically – and only in this way did anything she said make sense. She sometimes would do the talking for Granniana, if Granniana could not speak for herself right away.

“Do you know what’s the best medicine?” Granniana just asked, and Sunshine also sometimes answered when we could not answer Granniana’s questions. “Mama,” came Sunshine’s powerful answer. That was her answer. She always related to everything reflective of her emotional psychology. “Mama love. Mama hug.” She could not say the 'S’s yet, for personal nouns and pronouns.

It was ironic, I thought and wondered if this really was the answer to Granniana’s riddle, or just a coincidence, because Claudia did not give Sunshine much love and hugs. Claudia, at the moment, was not paying Sunshine any attention either. She was just relaxing; this was her time of day. Her feet were getting really tanned. I felt sorry for Sunshine. For little kids, love and hugs is the best medicine. Maybe not for grown-ups: they need the real pills and therapies.

Granniana was not satisfied with her granddaughter’s answer, herself. “The best medicine is laughter,” she concluded, and this by far outstripped little Sunshine’s answer, in all of our opinions.

Granniana turned to her little sweetheart and cooed and cooed, like a regular darling grandmother who never seems to see any flaws in her grandchildren. She threw some peas at the little one, straight out of the pod she was shelling, and Sunshine gave us her cutest, golden peal of baby laugh. Granniana threw some more peas at her to keep her laughing. She was so cute. It was so great to have a niece, and she was the only one in the family. Sunshine caught one of the tiny peas in one hand and ate it, without squashing it in her hand first at all – so she didn’t get in trouble for making a mess – and she giggled some more.

We all laughed. Granniana too.

Granniana was laughing: the most rugged, imaginative, brambly wilderness laugh. Granniana was all-better.

Later in her mid-nineties, she still said, when she was asked, that it wasn’t Dr. Getwell’s secret herbal medicine and the asthma puffer that made her well again. I know it doesn’t make so much sense, but it was laughter, the best medicine. It was laughter that cured her.

That was my Grandma. She was the wisest granny, who did things her own way, like most grannies. But I think my granny was the funniest. Or do you think your granny is funnier?”

The End

July 9, 2006

Look for Granniana’s Epic Epilogue: Granniana Goes to University